Top 5 strategies to boost your business in the post-pandemic world

Welcome to the new world – a post-pandemic world of future business. 2020 shook the world from its roots, but we congratulate those who struggled and survived its worst. This year has been a tough call for every small and large scale business without a single shred of doubt. But now we need to move on and ask the most dreadful question of the year: what’s next? 

“The Guardian” predicted that the global economy would suffer through loss in trillions if the viral outbreak turned into the pandemic. Such a grim prediction held, and now from multinational companies to garment industries to the education sector – almost all sectors are in hot waters. 

So what you need to do is to keep the post-pandemic PTSD in mind and prepare new business strategies. You need to assess, analyze, and re-implement new order of business to not only regulate the cash flow but also be among the prominent brands.  

Rise from the ashes to become a Phoenix – Plan, adapt, implement and evaluate

No one could predict in the beginning how worse the conditions were going to be. But now that our focus is towards strategic thinking, we have come up with the five possible strategies that may help boost your business in the post-pandemic world. 

Give the best discount/free offers 

How can you possibly give discount offers when sales are dead? Surprisingly, there are a few companies that thrived during the pandemic. Zoom is one of the companies that earned massive users from almost every household around the world. Since social distancing was subjective, Zoom devised a way for almost every business to stay afloat by making communications and work from home easier. Similarly, Google Classroom made homeschooling possible and kept the students engaged with their homework and lessons. 

So now that the world is reopening its shutters, the user base for Zoom expanded from 10 million to 200 million. Offering discounts for premium accounts and other benefits may not have benefitted them in the very beginning, but now the profit is in line. Since many people lost their jobs and businesses, the best thing to do is offer discounts to keep the sales going.  It proved to be one of the mainstream strategies for the overwhelming rate of signups on the premium free courses for digital marketers. It worked for the learners. 

So, according to the business niche, you need to find out which discount strategy works in your favor. 

Plan collaboration 

Every business is aware of its key strength and weakness. Usually, a business has a lot to show off when it’s about their core competency – a major skillset. Keep the core competency in focus and align with other businesses by forming a compatible collaboration. This effectively builds in a new product, introduces a new service, or even expands in the local and international markets. 

Strategic collaborations have helped e-learning platforms provide online courses with the help of best tutors and professionals’ expertise. Similarly, luxury designers like Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci, and Dior promised to produce face masks for Italy and France’s highly affected areas. 

Still, there are major brands in a similar industry waiting to pass approval from the WHO and EU on using “healthy materials.” Now that countries are coming out of the lockdown, customers are more careful about what and where they put their hands on. Now is the time to collaborate with fellow brands, create collaborative marketing strategies for potential customers. Businesses have the leverage of social media to start strategic brand collaborations. For instance, PE Nation collaborated with Divine Flow Yoga for live streaming yoga sessions. 

Retain customers with digital marketing 

Digital marketing is ever-evolving. Getting a new customer is easier than before, all thanks to social media and other major platforms, customers are more reachable than ever. The hardest thing is to retain the customer once things go downhill. During a pandemic, customer behavior changed. The least luxurious items like toilet paper became a “hot commodity,” so you see where this is going, right? 

Once the instinct to survive kicked in, consumers focused on buying necessities of life. The pharmaceutical business boomed, so did the gaming industry, and Netflix nailed it. In the post-pandemic world, businesses need to mount maximum output by going online. Digital marketing and the latest marketing tools have been effective ways to communicate with customers, identify with the most loyal and long-term customers, and make attractive offers for them to retain them. 

Improvise with the current situation 

Pandemic is not going to leave us all in peace anytime soon. By the looks of it, one of the most suffered through services was that of private rides. Transportation services like Uber, Careem, and Pathao, etc., got badly shut down. Not only the companies suffered during the initial stages of lockdown, but the staff also took a financial hit. Now that things are somewhat better than earlier this year, these transportation services collaborated with local marts and offered to deliver the groceries, medicines, and other delivery services from door to door. 

This provided the employees (captains and riders, etc.) to earn some cash while the companies worked on improvising the situation.  It would help if you came up with a solution, improvise your existing strategies, and adapt accordingly. 

In this latest recession, companies like Uber, Airbnb, Whatsapp, etc., focus on innovating their strategies according to the current world order. 

Share your success story as a brand 

Surviving through the lockdown was no easy feat. Still, many businesses and startups are busy counting the heavy financial loss. Customers are best able to relate to the success and failures of a brand. Consultancy firms, like McKinsey,  suggested brands on three major factors 

• Customer engagement
• Customer experience 
• A healthy relationship between customer and brand 

Digital marketing will serve as the platform to fulfill these requirements and rightfully so. Because of social distancing, not only customers but businesses also started to rely on social media platforms to engage the target audience. Keep up with the practice. Share how you struggled to survive and show appreciation to your customer first and foremost as a company and as a brand. 

Focus on providing the appropriate content to help customers build a positive experience with your brand. Involve customers to share their experiences, good or bad, throughout the pandemic and ask about their role-play. If a brand engages its customer’s emotional side, it has a better chance to retain the customer for the long-term. 

Penny for a thought 

As a business entity, you need to remember that pandemic may have cost you finances, or you may have to downsize your company, you can still make it through even with just one idea. Change your product and services the way consumer value keeps on changing during a pandemic. It will give you much needed control on value-shifts. 

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(Featured image by Pixabay via Pexels)

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