The pandemic that the whole world is facing right now has impacted all businesses negatively. Whether managers, employees, or businessmen, no one is satisfied with the negative impact they are facing.
People who are extremely impacted are the ones starting a business or trying to grow their business. Keep reading to understand how you can successfully grow your business during the pandemic.
Support Employees and Encourage Them
Having employees that are satisfied with their jobs is key to having a successful business. Employee support and empowerment are what form a good manager. There are many ways and strategies to follow that can help you encourage and support your employees. As a manager, the first thing you want to do is add more responsibility to the jobs and tasks you give your employees. Giving employees responsibility sends a message that you trust them. This gives them more confidence in their work, helps them be more productive, and in turn, they trust you more. It is best if you let them participate in the decision-making process and you let them express their opinion freely. This will help your whole business improve as teamwork will push the business forward, through employee empowerment. You don’t want your employees to fear you, especially if you want them to be innovative. Encourage them to take risks, understand that their ideas may fail, and be supportive of them no matter what the outcome is. All of this will get your employees to respect you, be innovative and productive, and that all will let your business grow.
Focus Your Efforts on Digital Marketing and Web Design
Due to the pandemic, many businesses have switched to online platforms. In consequence, when you’re thinking about growing your business you have to think about digital marketing. Digital marketing can be done through social media platforms. In today’s world, and especially when staying long hours at home due to the pandemic, people are always on their phones, specifically on social media platforms. If you’re looking to gain a lot of viewers and visitors to your business, it is best that you start by advertising your business over a few of the most visited social media platforms. The second thing you will want to look at is your website. It is said that a website visitor takes 2 seconds to decide whether they will continue browsing through the website or if they will leave. This is why you need to have a good Website Design to encourage people to browse through your website and attract them to purchase a product or a service. A good design is one that meets your needs as a business and has a smooth, quick, and easy user experience to ensure that the customers won’t get irritated trying to purchase something or understand something.
Host Virtual Events
Because of social distancing measures and safety reasons, you can’t go and meet your customers or potential customers as easily as before. This means that it is hard to provide people with information about your business and it is also hard to build a relationship with them in order to have lifelong, loyal customers. This issue can be fixed via hosting virtual events which will allow you the chance to talk to customers and interact with them. There are many video chatting platforms that you can use to interact with your customers or even your employees. To grow your business, you will want to host monthly events where you introduce potential customers to your products or services and try and convince them to choose your products or services. When hosting one of those events, you will want to make it short and to the point. Talking for too long means that the people will get bored which will make them lose interest in your business.
Tiptoeing around the topic you invited them to talk about but not talking about it will also irritate them and they will lose interest in your business, which is why you have to make everything relevant. You want to be formal during the event but not boring or robotic, engage people in the conversation and stop every once in a while and see if anyone has any questions. When someone asks any question, you don’t want to lie or make things up, if you don’t know the answer just be honest with your customers as this will lead them to trust you more. If someone asks about a service or a product and you don’t provide what they are asking for, tell them that you’re studying that service or product and may soon be launching it. You don’t want to lie and say you’re working on it if you’re not as you might lose your customers that way. If you notice that more than one customer or potential customer is asking for the same product or service more than one time, try to work on that product and add it to your business. This will not only increase your revenue but will also help grow your business by gaining more customers.
Consider Your Customer’s Point of View
Whenever you’re implementing any new policies, always keep the customer’s point of view in mind. For example, if you’re selling a product and you’re thinking about the return policy, and the product is actually something that the customer can return with no hygiene problems, you don’t want to implement a no exchange or return policy. Doing so will make the customer hesitant about purchasing the product, and they will purchase in smaller quantities. Don’t neglect hygiene and safety in manufacturing a product, providing a service, or delivering a product. Doing so will result in you losing customers, even if those steps increase your expenses, losing customers will drastically lower your revenue. Don’t increase your shipping cost or recommend any delivery companies with high shipping costs. Customers don’t want to be paying shipping that costs more than the product. Enforcing higher shipping costs will drive them to not purchasing your products. Lower shipping costs will encourage them to purchase from your business more than once.
Don’t manipulate or deceive your customers when advertising your products. This is the first step to gaining a customer’s trust through honesty and authenticity. A customer wants to receive the product they saw in your ad, on your website, or the product that you described. Receiving something noticeably different will discourage further purchasing of products or services from your website.
Relationships and bonds between yourself and your customers or employees are key to building and growing your business. Be sure to care about your customers and to listen to their feedback. Digital marketing and your website are crucial to maintaining a business during the pandemic.
