Quick survival tips for businesses during COVID-19 lockdown

Out of constraints comes creativity, out of chaos comes growth. Out of fears comes love.

With nationwide lockdown continuing in phases, businesses are experiencing major impacts no matter how established they are and are having to re-look at how they manage and operate their businesses including re-visitation of their sales and marketing plans.

Unfortunately, the impact on smaller businesses can be way more brutal as they have scarcer cash reserves and a smaller margin for managing such a hit. The ripple effect of this shutdown will have a key impact on India’s economy that is expected to slow down to a mere 2%. So, during such testing times, businesses, particularly MSMEs will have to adapt to a new set of rules and be mindful of the following aspects to alleviate risks and to survive the slowdown by COVID-19.

Create 3 months/ 9 months marketing strategy instead of yearly

If we are looking at a crisis looming for another the crisis 6 months to a year, businesses will have to reconfigure their business strategy to optimise the fixed versus variable expenses, renegotiate fixed expenses (rent, salaries, vendor payments, etc.), and focus only on the crucial essentials for survival. It may be a good idea to employ a smart digital sales and marketing strategy. Increase the proportion of digital marketing cost in the overall sales and marketing budget. Some serious reconsiderations would be required to survive the effect of the pandemic.

Anticipate and adjust your short-term marketing strategy The duration and severity of COVID-19’s impact on economies and sectors will undoubtedly vary. Businesses need to adopt to "anticipate and adjust” roadmap. Over the near term, businesses should explore marketing diversification and leverage new opportunities arising from changing customer demands. Over the short term term, product and service portfolio diversification will be critical to ensuring greater resilience.

Externally, strengthening brand equity and shifting sales channels online will be strategically important. Internally, adopting technologies that support workplace and operational continuity will enable companies to hit the ground running following the COVID-19 crisis.

Make a digital version of whatever offline business you do It’s probably a great opportunity to invest in longer term channels, particularly if you can shuffle your marketing budget in that direction. The world is noisy and uncertain now, so outbound marketing tactics can probably be shifted to building out inbound digital assets, like website, blogs, and sales enablement materials. Conferences can become webinars and sales meetings can become skypes / zooms and businesses can up-leverage digital marketing tools until the real world opens again.

Write back to me and share your thoughts. We are all in this connected digital world together. Aseem Tiwari, Director, Digital Marketing.