How to Adapt Your Business and Digital Marketing Presence During a Disaster or Pandemic

When it comes to prepping for a natural disaster or pandemic, it’s always better to be safe than sorry. The unknown can be scary.

You’re here because you want to know about how to pivot your digital marketing for a natural disaster or pandemic.

So, let’s get started!

If your target audience happens to be in an affected area, here are helpful tips you should follow!

Pandemic Tips for Team Success

Make the Switch to Work Remotely

In the case of a natural disaster or pandemic, it may be difficult or even unsafe to keep your employees working on site, which means you’ll have to shift to working remotely.

Fortunately, with the help of technology, this can be an easy move! There are team integration tools that enable you to have virtual meetings or consultations through including:

• Facetime and Zoom
• Meetings through Zoom or GoToMeeting which can include audio, video and screen shares
• Platforms to promote group or direct communication through messaging like Slack or Microsoft Teams
• Remote desktop access programs like GoToMyPC, so your staff can access their work computers right from their current location

There are also lots of other free tools you should take advantage of, too, like the Google Suite of office products like Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Google Drive.  Microsoft does have their own version of sharing and collaboration for the Microsoft Office Suite, but we have found the Google Suite offering to be a lot more efficient for collaboration efficiency and purposes. This will allow your team to continue to collaborate on the same projects together even though they’re physically separated.

Encourage Team Engagement

Worried about team engagement falling behind? Channel your creativity. You can encourage and foster team engagement by offering fun incentives like contests for cash or gift cards, such as a funny picture or best joke contests or hold conference video or audio calls. Some are even having virtual Happy Hours to keep the vibe alive amongst the team.  Staying indoors isolated from the rest of the world can be stressful and boring. Scheduling contests or sending funny memes to the group chat can help brighten up the day.

Virtual Transactions

Then there’s the question of how you’ll continue to process payments and orders and how long this pandemic will last. You can always switch to online transactions through online merchant processing with your current merchant processing vendor. If that may not be available to your business, there are simpler solutions like PayPal and Square to gain access to getting immediate payments efficiently.

It’s important to remember, this pandemic isn’t going to last forever. It may feel like it while in the thick of a situation such as this pandemic situation as a result of COVID-19, but this crisis will pass. Make sure to remind yourself and your coworkers that normalcy is on the horizon. While these types of things seem to have a lasting impact on how consumers engage, adjusting your digital marketing for now will help shape your business’s image and can also make a huge impact on consumers now, and in the future.

Pandemic Tips for Your Digital Marketing Strategies

Find Ways to Help the Relief Efforts

Consider giving back toward disaster relief and develop empathy with your audience. Here are some simple (but positive) things you can do:

• Donate to a non-profit organization that helps with disaster relief
• Get your staff to volunteer with relief efforts
• Donate your products (if it makes sense) to relief efforts
• Utilize your extra space or equipment to relief efforts

Audience Engagement 

Make sure your consumers and audience know what is happening at your company:

• Add a website pop-up or banner at top of page letting them know how you are operating
  • Website pop-up or banner onsite to alert your clients. For example, “COVID-19 Update: We remain fully operational. For more information about store hours and services, please contact info@assitance.com.”
• Blog about operations
• Pin a post on Facebook letting them know updates
• Share the services you’re offering to the community to help
• Social media allows us all to have constant communication, utilize this to your advance
• Update your Google My Business store hours and services

Create Useful Content

Need an example of (hopefully) useful content related to a difficult time? Well, you’re reading one right now.

We’re pretty good at digital marketing and are very familiar with the best marketing strategies to use before, during, and after a crisis. Our target audience (you) is interested in digital marketing resources.

At Exults, our mission is simple. We want to help and thought these strategies could be useful to share with our clients and potential clients.

Finally, Be Safe

Your safety comes first! So, please always be safe! Whether you’re prepping for a hurricane or currently struggling with the economic devastation caused by COVID-19, which is sweeping our nation, just know that we’ll all get through this together. Remember, while COVID-19 is temporary, it will forever change our marketing mindset and consumer engagement, so you must adjust your current digital marketing now to stay well positioned for the post-event consumer behavior.

Have questions about altering your digital marketing during this pandemic caused by COVID-19? Please reach out to the Exults team, just as you are there for your customers, we are here for YOU!