Your SMEs Survival Guide To Overcome The Impacts of COVID-19

There’s no doubt that small businesses will be the hardest hit from the current COVID-19 pandemic, with many fearing they won’t be able to survive this unplanned shutdown. Larger companies have a better chance of surviving with more cash flow at their disposal, larger retainer clients and, in many instances, a robust digital presence to help carry them through the shutdown.

However, this isn’t all doom and gloom for your SME. There are things you can do now to help weather the storm and prepare for the next few months to come, while still ensuring income and stability.

Here are some tips on how to get your SME through these difficult times and keep productivity up:

Tap into the resources provided by the government and financial institutions

Social responsibilities and initiatives have been put together and are updated daily to help take care of small and medium businesses during this time. More than R500 Million is available through the Debt Relief fund to help businesses affected by COVID-19.

To find out more about this, visit

https://www.moneyweb.co.za/news/south-africa/unpacking-the-smes-funding-procedure/

or

www.smmesa.gov.za.

Have a closer look at your payment and billing cycle

This is a good time to cancel all those small payments that aren’t bringing your business any real value. Perhaps you should even put your office rent or hot desk rent on hold for a month or two, while you work from home and save on travel costs.

Manage and conserve your cashflow by focusing your efforts on getting those signed contracts, and ensuring you have measurements in place to help turn online interest into sales. Also, re-look at your invoice terms and get your finance team on top of debt collecting all your monies due, no matter how small the amount.

Use your time wisely

As an entrepreneur, you and your staff are your companies’ most significant assets, so use this time wisely. If you can’t be operational right now, upskill with online courses, keep up to date with informative content via podcasts and reading material that is either motivational or will improve your skillset and give you the upper edge when life goes back to normal.

Have a look at your website

What improvements can you make right now? Chances are you will be receiving tons of new visitors to your site during this period, and you want to put your best foot forward. Working on website improvements or a complete overhaul during this time (only replacing the site with the improved version once complete) will ensure no downtime and be an efficient use of this period.

Invest heavily in digital marketing (if you can)

So many companies are stopping all marketing efforts right now, which means you can totally blow your competitors out the water with less spend or effort than you might have needed before. Here are the best ways you can invest aggressively in marketing at the moment. Firstly, brand awareness focused on keeping your business at the top of your customer's mind (even in their downtime).

Secondly, creating thought leadership articles ensures you and your business are the experts in your field. Lastly, pushing online sales will ensure your business’s economic status won’t be that severely affected and will keep an engaged audience.

If your company can still serve clients in a digital manner, now is the time to ramp up your marketing spend.

Re-assess your marketing spend

If your business had planned a trade show, in-person business conference event or any other in-person form of marketing, re-allocate this spend to different types of digital spend. This can be SEO, email marketing, social media marketing etc.

If you can’t market on Google Adwords right now, instead shift your marketing spend to SEO. That way, after this period, you’ll be reaping the rewards of an improved SEO score and organic traffic.

Protip! If you want to know about how COVID-19 has affected search trends, check out our review here

If you don’t already have an online store or any digital offerings, look into this now

Consider whether your offering is something you can provide online with promises of delivery after lockdown, or if you could offer any other online experience. This could be free webinars, inviting clients for virtual business conferences with other industry experts, industry-related articles published through your newsletter or other reputable industry publications, etc.

If you can’t be operational and conducting sales through this period, at least keep your business at the forefront of known industry leaders’ and experts’ minds.

Social media, newsletters and all forms of digital communication are more critical than ever 

Utilise these to stay in touch with your clients throughout the lockdown period. Competitions across these platforms also ensure clients engage with your brand and share your content.

Prepare a list of frequently asked questions with regards to how your business is operating during COVID 19 and its precaution methods 

Make this detail and reassurance available to the public, not just to your current clients.

Ensure client-facing staff are keeping lines of communication open with your existing clients.

Marketing and retaining existing clients is a lot easier than acquiring new business at this stage, so ensure you’re servicing your current clients exceptionally well. This could be through efforts like inviting them to participate as a thought leader in your virtual conferences or sending them relevant links to industry-related content. Don’t forget to inform them first of upcoming special offers and discounts, etc.

Utilise platforms to offer special discounts and offers

These can help support your SME during shutdown with deliveries scheduled after closure, where applicable. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by denying returns or exchanges.

Think about your buyer/target market and what they’re possibly doing right now

If your target market is consumers, they’re quite likely open to online shopping right now. If your buyers are other businesses, they might be operational and working from home, depending on their industry. Research your competition and see what they’re offering and how they’ve adapted.

Use this time to take a more in-depth look at what your top 5 competitors are offering

What diversifies your business from theirs? Do your customers know your unique selling proposition and are this at the forefront of all your marketing collateral? If not, the time is now to start implementing this. What are your competitors currently doing exceptionally well? What can you learn from this and start implementing today?

Plan for Q2, and how to recover any loss of sales incurred during Q1

This can be through a new incentive program for sales staff, diversifying your product or service range, for example. Plan your marketing ramp-up after lockdown now and start setting this in motion to stay ahead of your competitors.

There’s no doubt that if your business can survive this, it will be stronger and healthier when it’s all over. By using your time and marketing spend wisely, you can curb these economic tough times and turn your SME into a success story.

If you need any digital marketing tips or help marketing your specific business to ensure brand awareness, engage with your audience or boost new sales or signups during this critical time, reach out to us on www.arcinteractive.co.

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Tags: Covid-19, Coronavirus, Guest Post