Building Awareness

Your knee-jerk reaction is to cancel all your advertising in challenging times. Our recommendation is to do the complete opposite. This is the time when you should be connecting to more and more customers who are also looking for ways to overcome hardships.  You should continue to advertise in various outlets whether in traditional media or online. If your budget is really restricting you, think about scaling back rather than cancelling your advertising spends all together.

Besides advertising spends what can you do to build your brand awareness?

1. Increase freequency of your social media posts
2. Look at your existing social media content schedules.  Can you increase the amount of posts per week? This is an easy way to keep you top of mind and connected to potential customers.
3. Earned Media
4. Have you ever thought about your business differentiators? Do you have an area of expertise that is compelling enough to attract the attention of media outlets?  You could reach out to your local paper, contact a podcast producer or create a blog post that you shop around to other online publications or blogs. It is a pretty simple and cost-effective way to build your brand.
5. Creating Evergreen Content
6. How much evergreen content does your business currently create? Are you actively writing and promoting your blogs, do you have a series of videos for your brand, or do you connect with your clients through regular newsletters?

Building Trust

Have you thought about shifting your advertising focus during these rapidly changing times?  Think about moving away from hitting your customers with a hard-sell for a product or service and instead position your business as resource. For example, if you are a builder, rather than focus on moving your inventory, you could offer tips on how to declutter your home as you prepare to move.

Similar to building awareness, you can also build trust by positioning yourself in the media as an expert as well as creating your own helpful education-based content that you disseminate via your own marketing channels.

Innovation

If you have been putting off innovating, now is the time to kick it into high-gear! Innovation means so many things – it means updating your web site with new content for example, learning and implementing new programs to help streamline your business so that it is more productive (i.e. Mailchimp, Monday.com, Dubsado, Zoom, Acuity, Calendly), bringing some of your service offerings online, changing the way you connect with customers and the list goes on.

 Innovation ideas for business:

•  Create an informative video series for your business offering tips and how to’s (consider hiring a professional when you can)
•  Launch an e-commerce site for some of your existing product or service offerings
•  Develop an app for your business
•  Produce a series of newsletters offering valuable content for your customers
•  Offer free discovery calls with potential clients on Zoom 

The businesses that will succeed during these challenging times are the ones who are prepared for the future. Now is the time to prepare, to market, to challenge yourself and your business. When the dust settles, your brand will be at the top of mind and will be ready to serve your customers who have been watching you adapt and evolve.