With business struggling to adjust to a new reality of quarantines, lockdowns, and closed doors, we have prepared a brief but essential, Business Optimisation cecklist you can do to help your business.

1. Keep employees safe and productive.

The National Lockdown has made it somewhat easier to ensure the safety of employees as most of us are now working remotely. However, we still need to ensure employees have adequate resources and training available to address the challenge at hand.

Heres a handy resource for managing teams: Effective Home Working During COVID-19.

2. Evaluate your digital situation.

Calibrate where the situation stands before making adjustments to where the brand needs to go. This provides a comprehensive overview of gaps and opportunities.

If you are setting up a new online store or online presence, anansi can help you with getting your domain name acquisition and with web hosting solutions. Simply get in touch with us.

3. Update your website content

With many businesses on lockdown, you must use your website to communicate what’s happening with your own company. This will help shield your brand. You’ll want to:

• Ensure your homepage explains to customers how you’ve been affected by the lockdown. Are you open? Are you offering products or services still? Are there any changes to the way you run that clients need to know about? If you’ve closed temporarily, thank customers for their patience and support and let them know about any plans you have to resume services when restrictions are loosened.
• Make it crystal clear how customers can contact you. Make sure your contact details – from your phone number to your email address – are up to date and displayed on every page of your site.

4. Capture immediate business opportunities.

Move quickly to be the first to seize every growth opportunity that emerges. This requires a mindset and a willingness to take risks to turn disruption into advantage.

• Harness the power of video. For example, use video to create product showcases or demos for customers. You can also use video to offer your (previously offline) services remotely through the likes of YouTube, Zoom or Facebook Live.

5. Monitor and respond to your emails in real-time.

With customers unable to visit bricks and mortar offices or shops to ask questions, you may that the number of emails in your inbox soars during the lockdown. This may also be due to co-workers communicating, as they can no longer walk up to your desk or office. So make sure that you keep your communication as up to date as possible and open at all times. 

Along with email, SMS messaging is another highly effective form of communication. If you have your customer’s phone numbers on record, reach out to them with urgent updates through text message. Research from Gartner reports that while emails are opened about 20% of the time, SMS messages are opened up to 98% of the time. Find out about Bulk SMS Solutions.

6. Spend some time on Content Marketing

Your blog has become a crucial way to keep your business at the top of your customer’s mind. Post insightful content that adds value and helps your customers. Besides showing your customers that you do care about them, blog articles with strong SEO will serve as a source of visitor traffic to your sight in the future. Post content that helps your customers solve a problem. Ask yourself: What does your audience’s need right now? What do they care about? How can you help with this? Remember to be genuine, and to avoid the hard-sell.

7. Get Social

Build a narrative around your brand through the use of social media. During this lockdown, people are spending a lot more time on social media, if only because we are restricted from being social physically. Consider social media as a direct communication channel to your customers. Use this opportunity to connect with them. 

You can also add Facebook messenger to your website, to catch customer queries in an instant.

Need to upgrade your social media skills? Here is a free course by Printulu.

8. Start recovery planning now

Start preparing your marketing initiatives for the rest of the year. You will want to be ready when the lockdown ends. make sure you include conditional targets in your planning. This will help in planning for different outcomes rather than using fixed ideas that may not come to be.

These 8 action points include ways you can optimise your business for recovery on an immediate basis.

Bonus: Coronavirus (COVID-19): Basic Safety Guidelines.