When a crisis happens, it affects a lot of businesses. If you’re a startup, chances are that you’d be hit even harder. This is because, as a new business owner, you want more people to know what you do, despite the divided attention.
Not only that, but you’re also fighting for your startup’s survival in the business landscape for the long haul. And a lot of statistics show that about 70% of businesses fail within a decade of their establishment. This means that starting a business, doesn’t necessarily mean that it would succeed.
Doing so after a crisis makes it tougher. To stand out as a new business owner and survive after a crisis, you need to focus on marketing your business to the right audience.
The following five strategies will help your business succeed.
Create a Post-Crisis Marketing Strategy
A crisis will change the way in which a business runs while the behaviors of your target audience might change. Therefore, you need to create a marketing strategy that is designed for your business after the crisis.
It will layout the steps that your business needs to take and how each step will be executed. What this means is that you might have to adapt to a new situation.
Take restaurants as an example during the Covid-19 pandemic. As they have been closed, many have chosen to offer home deliveries while many bakeries have also done the same. This kind of strategy will enable your business to overcome challenges while still offering your products or services to your customers.
Take Your Business Online
If there’s one thing that the recent coronavirus outbreak should teach you as a business person, it’s the fact that having an online presence in the 21st century is a must, no matter the business you operate in.
If you’re a business owner that’s yet to take the plunge and move some of your business operations online, this is the time to do so. When you operate online, you open up your business to more people who will come across your products and services, if you market it the right way.
The first step to taking your business online is to have a website. There are a lot of ways to do this successfully with a shoestring budget on your own. However, if you’re just starting operations online, I’d highly recommend that you hire a web design expert. Since they have been doing this for long, they’ll create a professional website that’d attract potential customers to your business.
Aside from creating a website, you need to promote it so that your target audience can know exactly what you do and how you can help them. To promote your website, you can make use of the advertising platforms on Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on.
The more money you can spend on advertising your website (if done the right way), the higher your chances of getting more people to know about it.
Another way to promote your website is to use content marketing. With content marketing, you offer value upfront to your customers, with the hope that you’ll be their most preferred option when they want to make a buying decision.
While content marketing won’t cost as much as paid advertising, it usually takes time to get any meaningful results from the strategy.
Identify the Needs of Your Audience
As a business owner looking to survive after the crisis, you need to understand what your audience wants right now. Else, you might continue selling a product or provide a service that they’re most likely not interested in. However, if you understand what they want at the moment, you can make a pivot to satisfy their needs and make money for your business.
To understand what your target audience wants, you need to find a way to make them tell you. One effective way to go about this is to conduct online surveys asking them exactly what their new priorities are and how you can help them satisfy those.
Alternatively, you can find this information yourself without asking them directly. To do this, you can check out online discussion forums where your target audience hangs out. You’ll find a lot of these forums on Facebook, Reddit, Quora, and so on. Then, you need to join these forums and follow the discussions there.
In most cases, you’ll be able to find more information about what your audience is interested in right now from those discussions.
Create Systems and Processes for Your Business
After a crisis, there’s likely to be a surge in demand for some industries. If your business falls into this, then you might become overwhelmed very soon with orders.
To survive as a business owner, you should strive to fulfill these orders. Else, your customers will find an alternative. One of the best ways to go about this is to create systems and processes that anyone can use to achieve specific tasks. That way, if you’re overwhelmed with orders, you can easily hire new persons to fill the void for you immediately.
Without systems and processes, you’d have to train new hires from scratch, leading to a waste of man-hours and unhappy clients.
To create specific systems and processes for your business, there are a lot of templates on the internet which you can use. Say you run a credit union, this bank policy and procedure outline would come in really handy for you.
The earlier you can create systems and processes for your business, the better for its survival.
Keep Your Business Operations Local
It can seem tempting to reach for the stars when it comes to business and there is nothing wrong with that but during a crisis, it could mean that you lost focus on what matters.
Therefore, your business might benefit from placing a focus on reaching out to your local audience.
After a crisis, keeping things local will enable you to streamline operations, and then, when the time is right you can scale them up and reach a wider audience.
It’s All About Survival
A crisis can prove a challenging time for any business but when the time comes to emerge from the crisis, it is imperative that you have the right strategies in place.
These strategies are designed to help you overcome the challenges, ensuring your business comes out the other side in one piece and ready to take advantage of new opportunities.
DepositPhotos – business crisis
