Business Recovery Plans: What to Do When Re-opening
No greater disruption to the business landscape has had a tremendous impact than the coronavirus. Consumer behavior has changed. Employee priorities have also shifted. Markets now must be resilient to future risks from the virus. So resuming your operations will not be the same even as restrictions ease, enabling businesses to re-open.
Beyond assuring the safety of your workers and consumers when re-opening, reinvention is necessary to continue commercial growth post-COVID and into the future.
Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels
What Your Business Recovery PlanShould Cover
Optimize Marketing Efforts
The global crisis sped up the transition for people to go digital, giving power to many industries online. People are more dependent than ever on online shopping, using communication platforms like Google Meet or Zoom.
Whether buying or researching about a product, consumers are using the internet to find you. You must be there to meet them.
According to research, 93 percent of online experiences begin with search engines. This means that your website will be doing most of the work when it comes to engaging users and potential customers. The challenge here is that search engines show thousands and thousands of search results.
How is your website going to rank better than others?
Your business needs an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. SEO lends you online visibility and improves your reach. It’s cost-effective and practical when done right.
The right SEO company will start with helping you define customer segments because they likely have changed, which means the terms their searching for online may have changed as well.
A change in customer segments calls for a modified approach in your marketing. For starters, your customers may now be more concerned with their health rather than experiencing new products or that affordability has become more important to them than minimized impact to the environment.
When you identify those segments, your marketing message will be more targeted and more effective.
Enhance Remote Work Model
Apply a people-first mindset. Since the coronavirus hit, millions and millions of people around the world found themselves working remotely. As the world continues to recover from the outbreak, the future workforce will want to be given a personal choice: continue working from home or go back to the office.
Businesses need to make the employee feel safe while staying productive. People won’t be able to focus on professional responsibilities if their health, or their family’s health, is on the line.
Companies should be able to provide a safe workplace for their people and offer the necessary support.
Here are the key areas you need to focus on and prepare:
1. Handling the logistics (equipment and supply that will be allotted to employees)
2. Applying policies to ensure the effectiveness of the initiatives
3. Managing the network and bandwidth of your system
4. Migrating internal and external communications online (and implementation of collaboration tools needed for this to happen)
5. Providing the right web security and support to everyone (staff and clients)
Re-align Your Business Model
You need to know if your current model is enough to carry the company through these past few months. And determine if it will be able to help the business re-open successfully.
Some things to consider:
• What is your recovery or re-opening objective?
• How has the global crisis affected your target market? How did their buying behavior change?
• How you can stay relevant by adapting to the changing needs of your consumers
• Can you digitize your processes, products, or services?
• How soon can you start offering them online?
• What is the current financial position of your business?
• Have you analyzed the balance sheet, and P&L statement from the beginning of the previous fiscal year to the time the pandemic hit? Have you used this data to analyze the financial health of your business at the current time?
• What are the requirements to re-open your business?
• Do you have adequate resources to bring the business up to normal operating standards?
• How much will it cost you?
• Do you have a marketing strategy in place to promote your business?
• Have you thought about what products to include or remove in your product line?
• What are your sources of funding?
Ensure recovery in a post-COVID world by exploring alternative solutions that reinvent your business. Prepare to put in the work, and experiment to grow and thrive in the coming years.
Itamar Gero is the founder of SEO Reseller, a global digital marketing solutions provider that empowers agencies and their local clients all over the world. When he isn’t working, he’s traveling the world, meditating, or dreaming (in code).
