8 Tips To Drive Exponential Business Growth During Covid-19 Crisis

During these challenging times of Covid-19 pandemic, businesses are looking for creative ideas to not only recover, but grow during this crisis. Every business is unique, which means it has specific challenges and has to overcome the crisis in its own ways.
In order to ease the financial strain, small business owners are cutting costs, seeking government and other external funding, but most importantly, looking to generate revenue.
But as we all know, maintaining or increasing revenue during this health crisis is not easy. So here are 8 useful tips to help you generate revenue and drive exponential growth for a speedy business recovery:

1. Generate revenue online
In this new all-digital era, we need to think about how to adapt our products / services to be sold online. Whether you are a brick-and-mortar retail store or personal services provider like massage or yoga, now is the time to set up an e-Commerce store, offer your classes online, or create related products or services to sell in the virtual storefront.

For example:
– A massage therapist can offer self-massage tutorials and tools.
– A yoga instructor can offer classes online or sell yoga gear and clothes.
– A restaurant can offer home delivery through their website, or sell a cookbook with their recipes.

Think creatively to come up with ideas, but most importantly, identify your target market’s pain points and address them creatively, while maintaining social distancing.

2. Offer gift cards for future use
If you don’t offer gift cards today, well now is the perfect time to do it. Online gift cards are a great way to increase your short-term revenue while retaining your customers. They work especially well if you’re unable to digitize your services. But please keep in mind that this is accrued revenue for the products or services yet to be provided; it is truly earned once the product has been delivered or services have been rendered.

3. Adjust, not abandon, your marketing strategies
During these financially difficult times, you might be inclined to cut marketing and advertising budget. While analyzing its effectiveness is a good idea, completely demolishing your marketing budget might not be a great idea, because you are cutting off future leads, eventually drying your sales pipeline and suffocating your business.
Instead, think about how you can adjust your marketing strategy to continue to sell and bring in more revenue.
Shift your marketing focus to your online store, rather than brick-and-mortar one, by offering free shipping, exclusive sales, and discounts. You may want to switch from traditional marketing methods like flyers, banners, to Digital Marketing, by focusing on Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), content marketing, etc. Explore and experiment with different marketing strategies to see which one works for your business and gives you the biggest bang for your buck.

4. Ask your staff about new ways to generate revenue
Instead of letting your employees go, think about ways you might shift their responsibilities to focus on marketing and finding new leads in new target markets. Rather than dictating how this works, get everyone together to share ideas and solve problems in new and creative ways. You never know what new idea can turn out to be a gold mine. On top of that, involving your employees in business direction will not only result in more sales, but more invested staff with a high morale.

5. Consider price adjustments
If it’s been awhile since you reviewed or adjusted your pricing strategies, take a look at them now. Take some time to not only review your competitors’ pricing, but also how the economic impact has changed the market dynamics. It might make sense to reduce price to increase sales volume and reduce business overheads through economies of scale, or it might make sense to increase price to provide a premium, white-glove service to a niche market. If a special sales event is coming up, adjust your prices and offer discounts to attract lots of customers.

6. Take your Networking Online
If you enjoy connecting with other business owners and professionals frequently via different networking meetups, seminars, and exhibitions, then you will notice that Covid-19 crisis has migrated most of those events online. If you host any in-person meetings or would like to attend one, then it is time to explore popular video conferencing solutions like Zoom, Webex, Teams, Google Hangouts, etc. I know it will initially a bit awkward, but you will get used to it very quickly.

7. Increase your social media presence
What better way to spend time than promoting your business on social media? By posting regularly, you not only keep your existing customer up-to-date on latest business updates, but also generate interest in new potential customers.

8. Spend time enhancing and optimizing your website
As mentioned earlier in this post, this is the best time to build your online presence with an e-Commerce website. But if you already have one, then spend some time to review and update the content that has become outdated. Optimize the content to improve your search engine ranking for specific keywords that are relevant to your business and industry. Significant jump in ranking will only happen with long-term efforts on a consistent basis. The rewards of an optimized website are definitely worth the investment. There is tons of content on the internet for you to read and apply it on your website.

I am sure there are many more tips and tricks to help your business during this crisis, but the ones explained above will give the biggest bang for your buck, in a short period of time.