5 ways to boost your business during Coronavirus

The past few weeks have been tough, let’s be honest. The Coronavirus has hit us all in one way or another and business at the moment is difficult. With Debut being a digital agency, we are lucky in that experience has taught us that being able to jump on our laptops from anywhere in the world to fix a server problem is extremely beneficial. But for businesses still rooted in old school office thinking, remote working hasn’t came easy. Hastily setting up remote file sharing and video conferencing and then working out how to operate it is far from ideal. That mixed with losing business and staff and you can see how things can start to unravel.

We want to move away from the negatives for a few moments though and take a look at some of the positive things you can do while you are working from home, away from the office to improve your business and get ready for a post-Coronavirus UK.

Bring your products and services online

Now is the perfect time to sit back and look over exactly what services your business offers. At the moment, some or all of these may not be accessible to your customers so is there an opportunity to bring them online? If it’s a physical product you sell, chances are that it would be fairly easy to enable the customer to buy this online and ship it direct to them. If you already have a website, it can be fairly easy to add ecommerce functionality to it yourself. If you don’t sell products and your business is more in offering a service, there are still ways to offer this via your website too by using high quality content that the customer could download for a fee – things like videos, PDF guides, webinars etc. are great and easy to setup.

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Introduce new services

As well as the services you already offer through your business, perhaps you could also start offering something complimentary that you don’t already? If you are a photographer for example, you could offer how-to guides to enable your customers (or fellow photographers) to learn how to create particular shots. Creating a video series and walking through each shot is a great insight into how things are done and could earn you lots of valuable exposure and clients. Or perhaps you are chef in a restaurant. Why not show others how to cook the fabulous food themselves by providing recipes, how to guides and courses. Even if you don’t charge for this content, it is great exposure and highlights that you are an expert in your field so when things do get back to some sort of normality, you may be the first person they call for a table!

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Improve your website

Improving your website is helpful in all sorts of reasons but as you may have a little extra time on your hands whilst working from home, it serves as the perfect opportunity. You could start off with some simple spring cleaning and fix any bugs that you may have noticed as well as update any out of date plugins. You then might want to look at the website content and decide whether it is still reflecting what you are offering as a business or whether it could do with a refresh. This could be the copy as well as out of date images. You might want to show off a new project that you haven’t shouted about yet. Or maybe your website is well past it’s sell buy date and doesn’t work on mobile devices – it might be time for a brand new website. As well as your website, you may also want to give your google rankings a boost so perhaps you could start blogging a little more and add some fresh content to your website.

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Get more active on social

If you haven’t noticed already, social media has gone mad since everyone has been locked down. Whether that’s businesses sharing images of their home working environments, their office pets or even supportive messages to the NHS, things are certainly busier than ever. So it’s important to stay seen and stay relevant even during this time. Try and post at least once a day if you can. It may sound a lot but it doesn’t have to be a full blog post. It could just be a simple image you liked that you can reshare, a quick status on what you are working on or an article you read. Keep sharing and posting and you will stay in people’s minds. If you really don’t think you have the time why not hire someone? You might have to take care of it for now but perhaps when business picks up again you could look into hiring a social media expert to look after things for you.

Future Proof

Finally, use the time to future proof your business. Look into ways where you can improve your general day to day running, even when you are back in the usual office. Look into software that could help you. Was that video conferencing app you chose in a hurry the best on the market or are there better options for your business? What else could you use in the future? Have you thought about instant messaging apps such as Slack? What about project management tools like Basecamp or Trello? Do you need to think about introducing more flexible working in the future and if so, does that mean tweaking your employees contracts? Take the time to really look over each and every part of your business and improve it for the better.

If you require any further help or advice on any of the above, please get in touch by calling 07882 791689 or email hello@debut.studio