Active companies today will rule and dominate the market tomorrow. Does your statement sound like a reassurance, distant and unattainable during a pandemic and crisis that are choking the economy?
Think again. The crisis can also be an opportunity – to stay on the market, to reach new users with information about yourself and your services, to show social responsibility, to be more connected and closer to your customers, employees and partners, who have replaced real communication with that on social networks. Now they have more free time to hear you. And they need you. Don't sink into oblivion! Create content.
The golden mean
During a crisis and with reduced revenues, it is quite natural to reconsider your communications, cut company expenses, and minimize investments. It is important to do it smartly and with the days after the crisis in mind. By completely abandoning your blog, ceasing communication on social networks and creating content for them, you voluntarily withdraw, leaving room for competition. In this way, you reduce not your expenses, but your opportunities.
Refine your content, but don't give up on it. It is your bridge to consumers who, locked in their homes during a pandemic, are showing unprecedented activity online and on social networks. Any business that has shown imagination and flexibility in the new conditions, offering useful, entertaining, interesting content, will stand out, strengthen its positions and even conquer new ones. It is always easier to rush and mark an upswing and success after the crisis, if you have not stopped walking, albeit slowly, during the pandemic.
Read more: Growth hacking and copywriting – an unexpectedly good combination
What should your content be aimed at to be useful and noticed?
- Information about your plans and work that will reassure investors, partners and stakeholders. Help them feel secure. They need to know that you have not lost your potential, that you will continue to work at full strength after the crisis. Your partners are dependent on you and your work. The certainty that you will move forward together helps them not to look for other partners to replace you and to be confident about their own survival in the market;
- Be a support for your employees. The human factor is an investment that, once lost, will be difficult to recover. The people around you know the job in detail, have undergone numerous trainings, and you have been connected for a long time. You have built a community, a company family. Soon you will need them again. It will be much more expensive and difficult for you to build a team from scratch than to keep the existing one. Stay by their side during the crisis. Help them overcome it and remain your employees, providing them with what they need most at the moment, based on their fears and concerns. For some, this will mean working from the safe environment of their home while taking care of children or elderly parents; for others, continuing to visit the workplace with high security measures or traveling by company transport, replacing the dangerous city buses; for others, receiving financial compensation, assistance, to survive during these months. There is no one-size-fits-all recipe, but you can take measures for individual groups and target content to them that informs them that you are there for them here and now and that you are continuing together. By showing that you are responsible, honest, and open to their needs, you build lasting loyal relationships that will pay off very quickly after the crisis;
- Close to customers and users. Even if you have reduced sales, don't let customers forget about you. The most important thing is to keep them as an audience and show them that you are the right choice for them. The content with which you can attract their attention is as diverse as you are flexible and inventive. It can be:
- Content with useful information sought after and needed by users during a pandemic and crisis;
- Fun – distracting from problems, the gray everyday life, uncertainty and fears, awakening their dreams and smiles;
- Reassuring – information about the disinfection measures taken and guaranteed health protection, about your way of working during the crisis;
- Innovative – sharing the interesting and unconventional ideas you have implemented to continue working;
- For the benefit of those closest to users – for example, ideas, online games for entertainment for their children, confined to their homes;
- Socially responsible – if you can afford it, donate and help in the crisis. This way you will be remembered as a socially responsible company, which puts you one step ahead of others. Don't have finances? No problem. Volunteering, helping campaigns or people through labor, knowledge, equipment, provided facilities is also social responsibility;
- Educational – now is the time to offer your knowledge and skills for free or on a barter basis – online courses, advice, consultations, seminars, conferences. This step will help you gain widespread popularity, reach new territories, expand your audience in a way that no advertising could. Users who benefit and remain satisfied today will be your loyal customer tomorrow;
- Content related to promotions and discounts . In periods of financial difficulty for large groups of people, promotions are actively sought after. It does not necessarily have to be a direct reduction in price. Extra goods, free shipping, reduction or elimination of a monthly subscription, additional free services are also a good solution;
- Speaking of delivery … Content related to contactless delivery is useful for consumers seeking self-isolation due to the current pandemic;
- Content related to online payments . The danger of virus transmission through money passing through thousands of hands has been proven. The usefulness and practicality of information about online payments is a winning strategy.
Create, publish, communicate. If you hold your positions on In terms of readability and traffic to your blogs and social media profiles through appropriate and diverse content, you will be able to easily and quickly after the end of the crisis, retain existing users and even gain new ones imperceptibly, and take a leading position in the market. Those who are active today will accumulate assets tomorrow. It's worth it.
