How to Step Up Your Online Business After Lockdown

Lockdown has affected us all to some degree. It’s hit small businesses especially hard, as fewer consumers are venturing into brick and mortar stores.

However, for businesses with online services, or for solely online-based companies, the lockdown doesn’t have to be the death knell for business growth.

Whether your company has always been online, or you’re adding new services in order to keep your customers and attract new ones, isolation and quarantine can actually be an opportunity for you to expand your business. Let’s look at four different ways to elevate your business to the next level.

Address New Needs

If you want to keep your business at the forefront, it’s important to be adaptable. And with the pandemic hitting people all across the world, it’s even more vital to address it head-on.

Ignoring a big event won’t make it go away — and carrying on, as usual, will only make it seem like your business is ignorant of current events.

On the other hand, recognizing and addressing the new needs of your customers reinforces your interest in them and makes them feel as though your company really cares. Many retail sites are using banner headlines to let their customers know what they’re doing to deal with the issues caused by the pandemic. And some have included basic items like face masks in their product lists, even if they never sold them before.

Make sure that your customer knows that you’re not only aware of the circumstances, but that you’re taking steps to deal with them. “We’re all in this together,” is not just a truism, but also effective marketing.

Revamp Your Website

Big events make us stop and assess our situation. In this case, the lockdown might be the trigger for an assessment of your website.

You can ask yourself these questions to get an idea of whether a redesign is needed:

• How long has it been since you did a revamp?
• How up-to-date is the site?
• What new features might be helpful?
• How can you more accurately target your customers?
• Is your brand accurately represented?
• How quickly does your site load?
• How valuable is your content?

Moreover, have you considered giving your company a new look with a new logo? Find the right designer to create a congruent brand logo with your website revamp, and catch customer attention?

Based on your answers, you may just want to change a few things in order to give your site a fresh coat of paint, so to speak, or you may decide that it’s time for an overhaul. Either way, upgrading and adapting your site is a great way to make customers sit up and take notice, and will boost your online sales.

Highlight Your Company’s Efforts

We mentioned before that some company websites are noting their efforts to help with the pandemic in banners across the top of the website. And that’s a great platform to reach the customers who visit your site.

At the same time, sticking to one platform limits the number of people who are exposed to your services. Marketing on social media, like Instagram and Facebook, is recommended in this social-media-driven age of consumerism. But marketing doesn’t always have to be advertisements.

Consider putting out a “press release” about your company’s efforts to make things better. There are a lot of things you can do — donate some of your proceeds, offer discounts and sales, keep high hygienic standards, follow government-mandated health guidelines, work from home wherever possible. Any and all of these can be included in your press release.

Adapt the release to your social media profiles, and post them. Make sure your content is branded so that it benefits your reputation. And don’t shy away from posting about it more than once — don’t overload your feed, but it’s perfectly fine to update your customers on what you’re doing and remind them that you’re still working hard to do your part.

Boosting your reputation will also boost your business as a whole.

Double-Down On Customer Service

In the middle of a seriously stressful time, we all appreciate it when those we deal with are helpful and friendly, whether we see them in person or speak to them online. Customer service is always important for a business — for instance, 64% of consumers feel that customer service is more important than the price of a product — but in the middle of a pandemic, we’ve seen customer service drop off for a lot of companies, rather than rise.

Be the company that stands out. Online customer service can be done from home, so there’s no real excuse for not making it happen.

Since consumers value customer service so highly, putting your time and effort into making it a better experience will definitely help your business to grow. Happy customers tell others about the businesses that made them feel valued.

It’s Time to Step Up

Lockdown is ending for a lot of areas. That doesn’t mean that this is over, but it does mean that you’ll have even more opportunities to continue to grow your brand. Whether in lockdown or out of it, you can use these four tips to leverage circumstances in a way that allows you to help your customers, and keep your company going strong.