3 (Free!) Ways to Help Your Business Recover After a Recession

You don’t need us to tell you that it’s going to be hard for businesses to recover after the recession caused by the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic.  What you might not know, however, is just how easy it will be for businesses to recover if they take the right steps – starting today!

There’s a variety of branding exercises you can use to make sure your business is in the best shape possible to bounce back from the recession. In fact, studies have shown that businesses that survive recessions all have one thing in common: they prepare.

The strategies we’ll talk you through today can be done by any business, in any sector. Whether you’re an e-commerce website, a brick-and-mortar storefront with a supporting website, or a service provider – these are all business activities that will help you and your business come back stronger than ever before.

So, let’s not waste any more of your time – here’s 3 activities you can begin on (or complete) today to make sure your customers start coming through the door as soon as it’s safe to do so.

Get your website ranking on Google

Lots of people think that they need to hire a marketing agency on a huge retainer if they want their website to rank in position 1 on Google – or any other search engine. However, that’s demonstrably not the case. In fact, there are dozens of ways you can work on your website to get in ranking on Google for free!

You can start getting your website to rank on Google by:

• Making sure you research the best keywords, using Google Keyword Planner (or paid tools like ahrefs if you have any budget)
• Researching your competitors by looking at what kind of content is already ranking on Google for positions 1-5 and then emulating and improving on that content for your own business
• Ensuring your website is fast to load and user friendly
• Only hosting well-written content on your website

Cut down on unnecessary expenditure

When thinking about unnecessary costs, every business owner thinks “no, not me – I don’t waste any money!” However, we can’t tell you the number of businesses and brands we come across that have monthly expenditure coming out of their accounts that could be saved.

Here are some examples of wasting money that your business will need to survive the recession:

• Full-time employees that could do their jobs part-time, or freelance – e.g. an Accounts Manager that could do all of his/her work in 4 days instead of 5 (Employees are one of your biggest costs and should be punctual and efficient.)
• Paying for advertising when you could use free organic Google SEO instead
• Subscriptions to services you don’t use (or services you pay for the premium version of but could move to a smaller package). E.g. Paying for Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop when you could use free business tools like Google Docs or Google Photos
• Buying premium items instead of cheaper items that do the job just as well. For example, do you (or your employees) need that premium Arabica coffee, or could you make do with instant coffee?

If you find any money to be saved from your monthly expenditure, make sure you stop the subscription and payments as soon as possible – if you haven’t used the service in a long time or it wasn’t as you intended, maybe you’ll even be able to get a refund.

Target the right demographics with marketing

Although it can be a hefty cost, you don’t need to stop all your marketing efforts in order to save money during the pandemic. In fact, businesses that survive recessions are usually the ones that invest in marketing in the first place. That doesn’t mean you should blindly shovel money into your advertising campaigns, however.

Instead, you should make sure that all of your marketing campaigns are highly targeted. That means making sure you have a clear buyer persona in mind, and that you use the demographic functions in Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and even your email marketing software to make sure you’re only spending time and money on the leads that are the most likely to convert.

Here are some ways to get started targeting the right demographic for your marketing campaigns:

• Ask for user information upon sign-up to your email marketing (name, location, and why they chose to sign up are good fields to begin with) and then split your email recipients into lists based on interests, so you can send them highly relevant emails.
• Use demographic functions on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads (and any other advertising platforms) to target the correct age, sex, and location of customers for your product. (This will vary depending on the type of business you own.)

Save your business from recession

That’s it – there’s three ways you can help your business survive the recession – and you can even start working on all of them today. If you implement the above strategies, you’ll find that surviving the upcoming COVID-19 recession will be far less bumpy for you, whereas your competitors who don’t take these actions will suffer.