NOW is the time to ramp up your marketing and PR to get your business bouncing back from lockdown.

It’s difficult to avoid the ‘doom and gloom’ when reading the news. On the 12th August, the government announced that the UK is officially in a recession, we’re also continually being reminded of increasing redundancies, and that travelling abroad could result in a two-week quarantine – but it’s not all bad news.

The UK lockdown is continuing to ease. Theatres, indoor skating rinks, casinos, soft play areas and bowling alleys are all now open. Also, the new Eat out to help out scheme has helped the hospitality sector begin to recover – there were a staggering 10.5 million claims in the first week.

While the weather is good, people are more willing to get out and spend. This is the time to inject some rocket fuel into your marketing to get your business bouncing back.

Invest in marketing and PR

Marketing is an essential element of bouncing back. Marking and PR should be your primary focus over the next few months. 

Face-to-face business conferencing is still set to resume on the 1st October, so while you prepare for this, online marketing remains the primary way to connect with people.

Whether you have a big or a small budget, there are plenty of options for marketing and promoting your business. For larger budgets, we recommend you invest in content creation and advertising. This can include:

• Google Ads
• Remarketing (Retargeting) – Getting people back to your website
• Targeted Facebook and LinkedIn advertising

In addition, and for those with smaller budgets, we recommend you focus on Social Media and Guerrilla Marketing. This can include:

• Social meida marketing
• Competitions
• Email marketing (think about email automation)
• Content marketing

Your primary objective is to re-establish connections with your audience – PR. Remember, your audience is also seeing the same doom and gloom stuff on the news too. Remind them that you’re still here, you’re still offering great products and services, and you’re safe to do business with.

For more advice on using marketing and PR to get your business out of lockdown, read our The key to ending your business lockdown article.

Planning ahead – events

Face-to-face business conferencing is still set to resume on the 1st October. However, is it going to be the same as before? We suspect not. 

Before lockdown, we saw a glimpse of what business conferences in October are going to look like. Expect social distancing, limited to no contact with your branded items (business cards, leaflets and brochures) and fewer delegates.

Yet, there’s plenty of opportunities to take advantage of these situations. Its likely events will be cheaper to entice an audience. You’ll also have the opportunity to stand out from your competition by creating captivating, easy to understand banners and videos on your stand to replace brochures. Also, all attendees will need to register, and it’s likely that more contact details will be shared with attendees and exhibitors, so this is the time to create engaging followup emails to WOW visitors.

Keeping safe

If you’ve been out shopping or into a restaurant lately, you’ll have seen the number of people on the high street begin to increase. Confidence is starting to be restored. However, at this present moment, it’s not going to take a lot to lose it again.

We must not be neglectful of the measures in place to keep us safe. Keeping staff and customers safe at this time is vital to keeping your business open. Anyone confirmed COVID-19 should self isolate for at least ten days. This could result in key members of staff being unavailable at critical times. It could also damage your reputation with other staff and customers and negate all the hard work you did in bouncing back.

How ETC can help

If you need help creating a comprehensive ‘bounce back’ plan to reduce recovery time, take advantage of new opportunities ETC can help, please get in touch.

If you’re new to ETC, why not contact us for a free new business review? We’ll spend two hours with you, giving you professional coaching and will leave you with actions for immediate implementation.