Navigating COVID-19: A Simplified Guide To Resources For SMBS
By Kenneth Thomas in New York
As we see major operational and procedural shifts in how businesses are adapting to the Covid-19 pandemic, many of which will outlast this current crisis, it can become challenging to maintain and create clear-cut objectives and goals in this environment. These can range from the obvious, such as health & safety, managing your finances and guidance in the unknown. In this article, we’ll go over some tips that will allow you to start to make sense of it all.
First and foremost, for those brick-and-mortar businesses with a customer-facing business-model, ensuring the safety of your employees and your customers is paramount. Thankfully, the CDC (Refer to the Ministry of Health website for those in New Zealand) has produced a number of guides on how to protect yourself, your employees and maintaining a healthy workplace. These guides are separate and pointed to their specific goals:
Interim Guidance for Businesses (For employees and customers)
After being able to ensure that the work environment is safe, communicating to your customers any and all updates will keep your customer-based informed and engaged. If you haven’t already done this or created a checklist for this, here is a quick checklist that you can to refer to:
Be ready to send specific emails to your clients to get ahead of any specific concerns that there might be. This would be outside of any current communications, such as newsletters.
It would be prudent to change your voicemail greeting that would provide quickly digestible essential information a customer might need to know. The need-to-know could include any other channels of communication you might have.
Pinned posts on your social media profiles could direct customers to your website or any relevant links that you might have.
For those with physical locations, updated signage would work to keep customers informed.
Your webpage should be updated to communicate to visitors that the situation is realized and being managed.
The US Chamber of Commerce has produced a toolkit of free assets for Coronavirus response measures, which you can read here.
As Google has become such an integral part of our web navigation and presence, it is important to make sure that you are also updating your Google My Business listing. This would most likely be the first landing that a customer has with your business in a virtual setting. Here is what you should be updating:
Hours, if there have been any changes to them at all. There is also an option to mark your business temporarily closed.
The From the Business section would allow you to update and describe any of your services, such as ‘contact-free delivery’.
Relevant attributes, such as delivery, pick-up or drive-thru services.
What’s New posts would be able to be used as weekly updates, as they only last for 7 days, but this should not be utilized as a social media profile for updates.
If you need more information, you would be able to find it on Google’s Covid-19 Guidance Page.
Marketing & messaging should be adjusted to acknowledge the current crisis, both to stay relevant, but to also not present as insensitive during these troubling times. This would require you to update current campaigns and make edits to new ones. Here are some areas where you would be able to hone in:
Replace now irrelevant CTAs that would ask customers to engage virtually or inform of new
Remind customers what Covid-19-sae offers that you have, such as virtual services and contact-free delivery
Censor language that would be deemed insensitive from materials, such as anything that would include the word “viral”
Go over your scheduled content to make sure that it is not released in a manner that could be deemed offensive.
With the newfound Financial strain that the pandemic has put on businesses, this requires many to return to their books, with many requiring more liquidity to bridge them through these times. Here are some financial resources to fall back on:
Coronavirus Emergency Loan Guide and Checklist by the US Chamber of Commerce
COVID-19 Small Business Loan Resources by the US Small Business Administration
Multi-State Programs List by US Chamber
If your business model allows for you and your employees to work remotely, it would be best to take advantage of this as much as possible. Here are some resources that you would be able to refer to for any Covid-19-related finance challenges:
Productivity: If you’re one of the many businesses that uses Google’s free apps (Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, etc.), you might find their Tips to Work With Remote Teams helpful.
Management: Harvard Business Review has produced a Guide to Managing Your Newly Remote Workers, which also covers the soft-skill side of things.
Collaboration: This list has 27 free collaboration and file sharing tools that you can benefit from.
Finally, as this is a constantly evolving crisis, it is important to stay up-to-date and understand what the impact of Covid-19 is now and going forward: