7 Tips for Communicating with Your Clients While Working Remotely
These are challenging times for nearly all small business owners. Either your business is shut down because it’s been deemed as non-essential by Governor Hogan, or your business is essential and you’re struggling to handle customer demands while trying to cover your business expenses. Whether your business is essential or not, you need to continue to communicate with your current and potential customers while you work on your business. Now is the time to communicate!
We’d like to offer some advice on how to keep the ball rolling through the COVID-19 crisis.
- Keep in touch with your current clients through email and social. Change your message and let your customers know how you are helping your employees, customers, neighbors, or a local charity. Show them how your business is there for them and our community. However, be strategic and purposeful about your efforts to not overwhelm your clients with unnecessary or irrelevant communication.
- Use social media marketing and video creatively. Social distancing has substantially increased people’s involvement with social media right now. This trend should continue over the next several weeks. How can you leverage social to share tips, videos, demonstrations, and show off your business virtually? Videos are welcomed distractions today. Using an entertaining video with some humor sprinkled in will help to keep viewers engaged with you and your business while they’re not able to stop by in person. Be creative but stay true to your brand. Examples: A personal trainer could post a video of an exercise tip. A plumber could demonstrate how to fix a loose toilet valve. What can your business offer as a great tip right now?
- Take this time to write a blog you’ve been meaning to write. Talk about an important fact or change in your industry that would interest your clients. Post it to your website and share it through email and social channels.
- Update your customer email list. Enter all those businesses cards lying around into an Excel spreadsheet so you or your marketing team can enter and tag them in your email marketing software. Don’t have email marketing software? Get one! You’re missing a really cost-effective way to stay in front of your customers and prospects. Software like Constant Contact and Mail Chimp offer smaller packages or free tools to help get you started at a reasonable cost.
- Give away something to grow your email list on your website. Think about something a potential client would want and be willing to share their email address with you in order to receive that download. It needs to be something beneficial to them. Examples: a checklist, a “how-to.”
- Look at your website. Now is a good time to update it. Are there any changes you’ve been wanting to make to the content? Is everything up to date – content, services, products, contact information, addresses, maps, etc.? Is your site mobile-responsive and secure (https://)? Is it easy to navigate and is the content clear and understandable?
- Create a back-to-business marketing plan. Take this time to plan ahead and rev up your creativity to brainstorm ideas to engage your audience and get your customers to think about buying your products or services as soon as they’re ready! Where do you want your business to be in three months? In six months? How do you plan on ramping up sales? What service or product ideas can you focus your efforts on to separate your business from your competition now? It’s time to think outside the box!!
We would love to help your business as we all work through COVID-19.
We’re giving any business owner a FREE ONE-HOUR marketing consultation session. Let us help you get some ideas together to keep moving and start your plan now. We want to help you keep your business moving forward so you and your business are ready to act.
We’re here to help! Call us at 443-787-4951 today to schedule your marketing consultation and get started!
