changes you can make to your website during a pandemic

Make a COVID-19 statement on your homepage

If Coronavirus has affected how you do business, you need to let you customers/clients know. Whether you’re working from home, moved to selling online, or made any other changes, make it front and centre of your website homepage and keep your customers up to date. Buyers love brand clarity and transparency and will appreciate your honesty.

Top Tip: Use the call to action on your COVID-19 statement to direct people to your new e-commerce ability, your new delivery service, or other alterations in your services.

Situational analysis

Small business success is often based off being able to turn challenges into opportunities. Take this time to understand where you place within your industry, get to know and evaluate your current strengths and weaknesses and map out what you can do to enhance the good points, and improve the bad. There may be a variety of things threatening your business right now, but what skills and assets do you have to help your company rise above?

Innovate your inventory

If you’re in the e-commerce business, this is a great time to either expand your product range, or really drill down on your niche. For example, have you noticed how Vistaprint have started selling face coverings? Use this time to diversify your product range or upgrade your e-commerce platform and pricing features. Now is the time to invest in your online abilities.

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Create content that can be consumed from anywhere

Deliver online training videos, presentations, lectures, etc and embed these on your website. If you were previously relying on face-to-face interaction to sell your products and services, now is the time to turn on the charm to the webcam. We’re not suggesting anything seedy, don’t worry…

Top Tip: Once you’ve got the hang of using video tools, why not try and expand your promotions on to top video social networking channels, like YouTube and TikTok? Get there before the competition.

Digitise your marketing

Make sure you don’t lose track of your existing client based, or miss out on new customers by not employing digital marketing tactics now. Use your website to encourage people to stay in touch with you. Text marketing campaigns, email subscriber pop-ups, or banners. The world is your pixelated oyster. More and more people are feeling comfortable communicating with brands online now, well… do they have much choice? And, as the world starts to think about grasping some normality back, consumers are realising that the digital way of researching and buying isn’t so scary after all.

If analytics are all a bit of a jumble of percentages and graphs, we’re here to tackle that for you, and turn your analytics into real, tangible objectives. Hit us up.

Online analytics

We’re not sure we’ve ever known of a time when it was so important for every single business to become more focused on their digital analytics. How have your pay-per-click campaigns been doing in this time of crisis? Are people searching for something you offer now, more than ever? If your PPC campaigns aren’t up to scratch, your competitors can pip you to the post, potentially taking away a part of that valuable market share.

SEO

With any spare time, you should always be keeping on top of your search engine optimisation and be monitoring your website’s position in search engine results pages. Listen, we know that’s easy for us to say, but hard for you to make time for. That’s why we offer to do it for you.

However, while we’re all staying home and twiddling our thumbs, make sure you audit your website for any major SEO issues and note down any improvements that you want to make. Is your customer journey through the website seamless, or could it use some tweaking? How are you performing in the organic search results, when compared to your competitors? If people are searching online for what you offer, believe me, they 100% are, you need to stay above the rest. Page one on Google, here you come!

Customer information

Okay, so, you’ve collected your analytics, your website SEO is on point, you’ve got your target audiences’ email addresses and you’re sending them valuable information about your business. But, what if one of your clients becomes unreachable, whether that be through illness, or a crappy WiFi signal at home? Take this time to make sure you’re storing every bit of data that you can about your clients, to make sure that you aren’t left unable to work because of it. Collect any passwords, or logins that you need from them, any additional contact data and reports. And, for the love of all that is holy, save it in a secure place.

Do what you can

There are countless ways in which you can support the effort of the heroes who are trying to get us through this horrible time. And, while unprecedented seems to be the word of 2020, let’s not lose sight of what that actually means. You need to keep your business activities positive. If you’re working with a particular charity, or have supplied any products to key workers, shout about it! Your website is a place to update your consumers, be proud of the work that you’re doing and be sure to share messages of hope to all.

Okay, we may have covered lots here, but that’s because we truly believe in small businesses and want to see them succeed. If you’re struggling with getting your organisation through the Coronavirus pandemic, we’re here to help out. Give us a message, or a call and we’d be happy to advise you on what we can do to give you a leg up.

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