10 Ways We’re Helping Businesses Navigate the Current Climate
Over the past few weeks, you’ve likely been inundated with coronavirus messages from every company you’ve ever interacted with (and some you haven’t!).
We’re right there with you—and we’d like to give you some positive news that’s not “just another coronavirus email.” We’ve been helping our clients navigate through these unprecedented times and we’ve noticed a thing or two over the past few weeks about what’s working and what isn’t.
Here are 10 ways we’ve been helping business owners navigate this crisis and come out the other side stronger than ever. These are just a few of the things business owners should be thinking about doing right now to prepare their business for the months ahead.
1. Setting teams up to work remotely.
After more than five years of operating a fully-remote company, we’ve learned a thing or two about how to run a remote team. Now we’re sharing that knowledge with our clients and our community.
We’ve created a free Facebook Group called Making Remote Work Actually Work that anyone can join by heading to remote.getleverage.com. Our CEO and Founder, Nick Sonnenberg, is holding frequent webinars, Facebook Lives, and workshops to help business owners adapt and set their companies up remotely. If you need help choosing the right tools or figuring out how to run remote meetings, this group is for you.
The Leverage Operations Team is also helping many of our clients set up and optimize remote tools like Slack, Zoom, and various CRMs. They’re also setting up custom automations to save time and make workflows more efficient.
These tactics are necessary to keep things running smoothly right now, but it’s far more valuable than that. Remote work is the future, and businesses will need to be set up to go remote if they want to adapt to the future of work. Even if your business isn’t fully remote, having a remote “back-up plan” can help safeguard your business against future crises, allow you to hire better talent from around the world, and increase employee happiness.
2. Updating marketing strategies to focus on the NOW.
Marketing strategies are generally built with the intention of executing over multiple years and achieving long-term goals. Unfortunately, most of them don’t account for a 3-month global pandemic that causes nearly every business to make radical changes.
Marketing strategies for small to medium-sized businesses need to be adaptable and agile in order to focus on what’s happening right now. A year-long marketing campaign isn’t going to help if a business isn’t going to make it through the next few months.
We have a fiduciary duty to our clients — in this case, that means looking at things through a short term strategic lens so we can minimize the immediate impact of the situation. As a result, our marketing and growth strategists are currently helping many of our clients adjust their marketing strategies to focus on what needs to happen in the immediate future to keep revenue coming in.
3. Moving events from in-person to virtual.
With practically every live event in the next two months being cancelled, there is a huge demand for livestreamed events right now — from concerts to webinars to coaching sessions.
Since rock bands are not our primary demographic, we’ve been more focused on helping our clients turn their live workshops and coaching sessions virtual. This can be done for any type of event, regardless of size — from large workshops to 1-on-1 coaching or training sessions.
4. Turning livestreams into valuable evergreen content.
You can’t expect everyone to make it to your livestream, and unedited recordings can be long and cumbersome to watch. We’ve been helping our clients turn their raw webinar recordings into valuable content by removing all the not-so-great bits, adding graphics, and highlighting the parts people need to see.
From there, we can take it a step further by repurposing the content into blogs, podcasts, social media posts, and more. This is one of the simplest ways to maximize the reach of your content, and it’s more relevant now than ever as people are looking for content while social distancing.
5. Taking products online.
Social distancing has impacted nearly every brick-and-mortar store, and in some cases, shut them down entirely. We’re helping businesses take their products online with Shopify websites, funnels, and systems to make sure they can keep selling and generating revenue regardless of what’s going on in the world.
6. Staying in touch through social media.
According to the Global Web Index’s Coronavirus Research, 70% of people around the world are spending more time on their phones. Many companies are realizing that now is the time to establish a social media presence so they can stay top of mind with their customers and get the word out about changes or updates to their products and services.
We’ve been helping companies establish and maintain their social media presence through consistent posting and content creation for years. These days, our marketing team is all hands on deck — creating content and keeping our clients’ social media accounts up to date with more frequent posting to keep everyone informed.
7. Documenting core company processes.
Documenting processes is one of the best ways to safeguard any business from situations like the one we’re in right now! If someone gets sick, a well-documented process means that anyone can jump in and complete the core functions of that person’s job without any prior knowledge.
At Leverage, we’ve become experts in process documentation — specifically, documenting processes in the cloud so they can be accessed from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. While many companies document their processes in physical SOP binders, that just doesn’t cut it when you’re forced to go remote. We’re digitizing the SOP binder by setting up fully functional processes for our clients and their teams in process management tools like Process St.
8. Identifying supplemental income streams.
Some businesses are finding that their main source of income is slowing down or coming to a halt due to social distancing, the economic situation, or a variety of other factors. Now is the time to consider adding supplemental income streams to your business model — not only to keep your business afloat, but to offer much-needed services to your customers.
We are finding that many customers have unique needs right now that aren’t being captured anywhere else — they need support with remote work, they need virtual training or coaching, and they’re looking for ways to stay connected while social distancing. There are many opportunities to add supplemental income streams to your business while also providing more value to your customers.
9. Coronavirus communications.
No one wants to write yet another coronavirus email, but sometimes it needs to be done. Whether it’s an update about an upcoming event or changes to a service, or putting a positive spin on things — we’re writing more emails and social posts than ever. This can be a tricky thing to navigate, as it’s important to be sensitive to everyone’s situation during these trying times.
10. Deploying the Leverage safety net.
As employees get sick and teams are stretched thin, we’ve been jumping in to handle everything from copywriting to product launches. As a fully-remote team, we’ve been lucky enough to be able to continually support our clients through these times. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been providing additional support for teams of all sizes, taking on whatever they need to keep things running smoothly.
For Leverage Clients:
If you’d like us to assist you with anything mentioned in this post or if you need some help getting through these tough times, let us know!
We’re ready to help however we can — simply click here to submit your task now or send an email directly to our Head of Growth, Andrew Parkes, at andrew@getleverage.com.
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