Keeping business personal during lockdown
Guest post by Charlotte Nairn
For our small business owner friends out there, we wanted to share some innovative marketing ideas we’ve been looking at that may help you reconnect with your customers in these trying times.
With lockdowns dragging on, we wanted to share some low cost, high impact ideas that you can easily implement yourself with just a phone or PC at most. Ideas that you could also keep going when things return back to normal.
Asking for user-generated content
Your customers miss seeing you and you probably miss them too. This is especially true if you’re in hospitality or retail, where foot traffic is the lifeblood of your business. For these businesses, and many others, social media content is probably lacking more than usual now too.
So why not ask your customers to share a few words on your business, or themselves?
If you’re looking for user-generated video content, there are some really interesting tools available now like Vloggi (an Australian technology company). Vloggi helps you collect short and sweet videos from your community and automatically edits them for you.
Send out a question like, “what do you miss most about us?” and your followers can record a quick response on their mobile phones, which you then receive edited and ready for use on your website or social media.
In a time where face-to-face communication is limited, this is a really engaging way of acknowledging your loyal customers and showcasing them to your online community. You could even make a fun contest out of this and reward the best responses.
Sending out authentic video content
On the other hand, your customers probably want to hear from you too! Blog posts are nice, but nothing beats seeing and hearing you in action.
Why not send out short videos of you and your team members featuring useful tips, funny stories or thought-provoking ideas?
As devastating as lockdown has been to many businesses, hairdressers could keep clients engaged by sending out video tips and tutorials on how to cut and style your own hair at home (potentially funny stuff if coupled with some user-generated contributions); restaurant owners can send out delicious recipes for fancy DIY meals and cocktails – you get the idea!
For less impacted businesses, you could also be thanking customers for their continued support and how that has kept your employees in work and your business going.
Another Australian tech company, Bonjoro, offers a useful platform for sending out short videos from you and your team to your customers at scale.
This could augment or replace your traditional email marketing campaigns for a time, with video messages standing out in customers’ inboxes. Bonjoro suggests a 60% open rate for video messages in comparison with an average email open rate of 21%.
At the very least, your loyal friends and customers get to see your face again!
Livestreaming events
Depending on your business, it might be appropriate and fun to host periodic online events to actually bring your customers or community together.
If you want to keep them updated at scale on important updates, changes and/or information, you could always host a Zoom webinar or call to present to them and take questions in real time.
It can be a really good time to “give back” to various online communities by volunteering to speak on various helpful topics and participate in online events. These communities won’t disappear when lockdown ends and will remember your contributions.
For a bit more fun, you could be hosting live calls with loyal customers (and of course your internal team) with private events or Friday night ‘Zoom drinks’.
If you’re interested in these sorts of ideas, be sure to check out as many other online events as you can to learn more about best practice and some of the latest ideas you could be implementing too. Not to mention getting to know some people online who might then attend or help promote your own events in future.
Being vocal in online groups and communities
There are so many types of groups your business could become active in, especially on Facebook. These include industry-based groups (e.g. retail or hospitality workers), suburban groups for your local area, hobby-based groups and many others.
In the midst of lockdown, many people are taking to their local Facebook groups to share anything important, and just maintaining a presence on these will increase brand awareness.
If you or your brand is frequently seen commenting with good advice and helpful expertise, or just generally being pleasant and kind to others, this will build goodwill and interest in you over time.
The key to this is staying active and consistent in your interactions. If it’s relevant to the post you’re commenting on, don’t shy away from sharing your business’ story to get your brand out there.
A word of caution: if you hold somewhat controversial views (and you can judge that based on what you see from others in any particular group over time), just be careful with when and how you choose to contribute. This activity can be as damaging as it can be helpful to your brand and business.
Any group with genuine and engaged community interest has potential. We also advise against advertising in these groups, unless it’s a group specifically for raising awareness of small businesses. People will grow tired of seeing ads and you don’t want to garner negative attention. We suggest just sticking to making genuine contributions and offers to help others where possible.
Out with the old
Now can be a good time to just check and update all your online presences for consistency, accuracy and completeness. Are your business directory listings, social media presences and website(s) all up to date? Do they all have the latest branding and company messaging? The latest images and videos? Any images or videos?
Especially if you’re going to collect some of the content mentioned above or become a little more active online, it makes sense to try and ensure anyone who becomes interested in you has a clear and consistent experience interacting with your brand afterwards.
In summary
We know this is a difficult time and just getting by is the top priority for many businesses. However, if you or your team find yourselves with any extra capacity, we hope some of these ideas come in handy and help take your marketing communications to the next level – both during lockdown and beyond (hopefully soon)!
Please feel free to contact us if we can clarify anything above or answer any questions you may have.
With thanks to Charlotte from Metamorph Marketing for this post.
IMPORTANT NOTICE
This blog post contains general information only and has been prepared without reference to your objectives, financial situation or needs. Allworths cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of the information contained here. By making this information available to you, we are not providing professional advice or recommendations. Before acting on any of the information contained here, you should seek professional advice.
