COVID-19. The term strikes terror into businessmen and women everywhere. The sickness has created a pandemic that has shuttered stores, stopped up spending, and generally crippled economies across the globe.
Unless you’re one of the few companies that is both large enough and positioned properly to take advantage of the ongoing crisis, your company is likely struggling at the moment. While apathetic leaders can try to hold out for government aid and slide into debt as they try to ride out the storm, proactive entrepreneurs should already looking for ways to make the best of the current situation.
Focus on Inside-Out Growth
With so many variables impacting sales, marketing, and more, it’s wise to start your growth efforts by addressing something that you can control: your internal operations.
Cultivate A Growth Mindset
Concepts like a “growth mindset” and “continual learning” have always been important for the longevity of an enterprise. However, in the ever-evolving 21st-century business landscape, they’ve become absolutely essential to sustained growth.
As you look for ways to grow your business, always begin with the core concept of a growth mindset in your leadership, your staff, and your company as a whole. Are you willing to accept that what worked yesterday may not work today? Are you always striving to improve and build on existing success? Do you encourage your employees to learn new skills on a regular basis?
This is ground zero for building growth in a challenging economy.
Get Organized
If you want to thrive in unknown circumstances, it’s also important that you maintain a lean and mean workplace. You can do this by going over your current operations and looking for any way to cut away the fat.
This may feel harsh, and maybe even brutal at times, but you have to remember that you’re doing so for the long-term benefit of everyone that is depending on you for a product or a paycheck.
The best way to get organized in order to pave the way for sustainable growth is by creating a business growth strategy. This should focus on three different things:
- Hiring individuals that you can trust to do high-quality work, even when you’re not with them.
- Delegating said work to others so that you can focus on cultivating growth.
- Maintaining a big-picture mindset at all times.
In addition, it’s essential that you consider how you’ll operate a workplace in the midst of the threat of an outbreak. Companies can be held liable for a workplace coronavirus outbreak, so proper precautions — such as sanitization, cleanliness, and social distancing — must be clearly established so that COVID-19 doesn’t upset your growth plans.
From hiring quality employees to keeping long-term goals in mind, it’s crucial that you create a strategy before you put anything into action.
Set Goals and Benchmarks — and then Assess Regularly
If you want to grow, you need to know what you’re trying to grow towards. As leadership, make sure to set:
- Clear growth goals, such as a certain level of revenue or a number of new clients.
- Short-term benchmarks to focus on as you work towards longer-term growth goals.
- Scheduled times to assess your growth in order to make adjustments where necessary.
By setting goals and assessing your progress, you can help your entire team remain focused on the end game.
Outward-Facing Growth in a Pandemic
Along with internal improvements, if you want to grow, eventually, you’re going to need to make adjustments in the way you interact with external factors. You can do this during the pandemic in multiple ways.
Perfect Your Website
Nearly everyone has a website at this point. However, it’s critical that you conduct research and then perfect your website to provide the ultimate customer experience. Ways to do this include:
- Asking customers for feedback on your existing site.
- Researching trends and changes in the online world to keep your site on the cutting-edge.
- Studying competitor sites to see what is working for others in your niche.
Your website is your marketing and sales foundation in a remote-heavy pandemic world. Make sure it can hold up.
Steer Into Digital Marketing
Once your site is set, use it as a central hub for all of your online marketing activities. This should include:
- Social media to create an online community and provide customer service.
- A company blog to generate high-quality content for customers and help with search engine optimization (SEO.)
- Pay per click advertising to find new customers on search engines.
- Influencer marketing to find popular personalities in your field help to market your products.
- Email marketing to foster a loyal customer base with direct and personalized messages.
Online marketing has become critical to success in a social-distance world.
Study Your Market
If you want to grow, it’s also essential that you both understand and maintain a positive vibe with your customers. This can be done by:
- Studying growing trends and market shifts caused by the “new normal.”
- Keeping an eye out for shifting customer expectations in your industry created by the pandemic.
- Communicating any changes with your customers that you’re making to accommodate rules, regulations, and general safety as you operate.
Staying abreast of changes such as these allows you to react to them appropriately as they develop.
Growing in a Pandemic
Growing during the coronavirus pandemic is no easy task. However, it’s certainly attainable in most situations. The key factor is the attitude of business leaders toward their enterprises.
If you adopt an apathetic, “just get by” approach, your business is going to suffer — if it even survives in the first place. However, if you take an aggressive, positive approach with an eye not just towards surviving but also toward growing, you can overcome the numerous challenges that you currently face and realize growth, even during a pandemic.
