As the Coronavirus “got real” here in Michigan this week I started thinking seriously about just how disruptive this will be for so many businesses. People will stop going to malls, restaurants, bowling alleys, concerts. Downtown events, which start ramping up in spring and are the lifeblood of so many small communities, are likely to be canceled. Vendors and small businesses will be hurt, badly.
What kinds of strategies can mitigate this? How can a small business in Northville or Plymouth or Ferndale hope to compete against a highly viral, quickly spreading bug?
I’m no expert on viruses, but I do consider myself a good digital strategist. And this is the time to think about strategy. Here’s what I suggest to any small business out there, contemplating a sudden drop in business:
- Communicate with your customers. They likely won’t be coming into your store or restaurant, so make sure you have a strong strategy for doing it digitally. Facebook, for all its recent failings, is still a great place for this. The Detroit Free Press’ Woodward 248 Facebook page has been a great success at this, bringing news and community to residents and business owners along the Woodward corridor. If you have a Facebook page, use it to let your customers know what you are doing to protect them if they do come in, and what you are doing offline as well. A Facebook page is a great place to start a conversation; encourage your customers to comment and ask their own questions. LinkedIn is another great place for communicating information about your business, but for small businesses I still think Facebook is best. Boosted posts (those you pay for) are definitely in order here. If you don’t know how to do these, and don’t have someone affiliated with your business who does, it’s time to consult an expert or to learn quickly how to do it yourself. It’s not hard, but given that most organic posts from your business are not likely to reach your followers on their own, paid posts are the way to go.
- Communicate, Part 2 – Email. Do you have an email list? An email newsletter? If so, use it to do what I suggest in Tip 1. If you do not have one, consider creating one. If you have no idea how, and don’t have anyone on your staff to do it, drop me a line; I can help.
- Consider delivery. Yes, the larger stores and supermarkets do it already, and there are numerous services for personal shopping and restaurant delivery. But what about your own shop? What about personal delivery of your own goods? If you are a local hardware store or the garden shop down the street that you know locals come to first for their goods why not find a way to get those things to your customers? This, of course, requires that you have a system in place for taking orders, through a website, a phone line or an Etsy site. There are a lot of ways to do this, depending on your capabilities. But the bottom line: Be ready to change your method of customer delivery from handing something over the counter to delivering it another way. Shipping is another option, although it can get really expensive. If your customers are mostly in a defined area, customized delivery might be the way to go.
- Shore up your website. If you don’t currently have clear messaging around your products or services, you need to start thinking about that. Sometimes, that’s best done on an Instagram page. But a basic area of your site to display your products isn’t hard to create. If you don’t have a secure site where you can take orders, create a basic form that goes to your email or list a phone number til you do. Does your home page clearly speak to your customers or visitors? Does it tell them quickly what they need to know? Do you have a call to action — a phone number, email address, or contact form? More about best practices for websites here.
- Reach out to your customers. Don’t wait for customers to find you. Unlike your storefront, which is there whenever someone drives by or walks down the street of your downtown, your website and social media pages only reach people if they can find you. That’s a small percentage of your potential audience. It’s time to invest in keyword marketing, paid social media and, potentially, programmatic digital advertising. It’s time for you to find your customers, and not wait for them to find you.
- Amplify your message. Make sure that you have a retargeting pixel on your website (and if you don’t know what that is, study up.) If someone happens on your site based on a Google search or a link off social media, they likely will leave without buying anything. But if you add a pixel on your site that retargets those visitors, they are 70 percent more likely to return and convert based on seeing your message elsewhere online. You’ve all seen it: The Clinique or Roxy or Hilton ads that follow you around after you’ve been shopping for makeup or shoes or travel. Those ads don’t magically appear. Visitors to your site can be tracked and have ads for your products delivered to them, much as you receive those ads as you navigate yourself on the web.
- Think like your customer. If you were stuck working remotely at home all day, told by your company to stay away from the office and to socially distance yourself, what would you want and need? Where would you spend your time? Likely, you’d spend more time online, or turn on the TV. Consider OTT advertising, which is that messaging you get on HULU or other channels that requires you to watch an ad before seeing more of the show. Or programmatic ads delivered to mobile apps of all kinds. If you want to reach your customers, you’ve got to think about where they’ll be, then plan to be there yourself, with messaging that resonates.
These may seem like simple things; perhaps you as a business are already doing them. But if you are not, I urge you to be proactive. It doesn’t matter whether you are a small town kitchen shop, a local pet store, a car dealership, a landscape company or a stylist at a hair salon. if you haven’t seen it already, you will experience a drop in walk-in business as people hunker down. Now is the time to think digitally about reaching out to your audience, and to take the steps needed to do so, adjusting your model to keep your customers happy and your business healthy.
