Last year was described in many ways, and among those was that it was a game changer. The need to move all types of business online almost overnight understandably caught so many by surprise, and for some of those the cost was heavy. For those that survived, the entire landscape has changed, with many traditional ways of attracting and interacting with customers wiped from the board.
However, as some doors closed, many others have opened, and whole new ways of contacting customers have evolved, or have been more widely adopted. If you are wanting to boost your business in 2021, here are some strategies you can use as a starting point.
1 Upgrade your website
Even if it wasn’t before, your website is now pivotal to your success. While it might not be the first impression a potential customer gets of you (more on that in a minute) your website is the place where they will find out more about you, book an appointment, or make a purchase.
With this much riding on it, you probably shouldn’t be using any half measures. Find a professional agency to upgrade your website so it loads quickly (many customers will click away if a page is slow to load) and visitors have the most seamless experience possible when finding what they need.
2 Host virtual events
With much of the face-to-face contact with your customers not as easy as it once was, you’ll need to replace any trade shows or events that used to pull in new customers. Putting together an event such as a virtual expo is not only beyond the technical capabilities of most businesses, building the whole event from scratch also sounds prohibitively expensive.
One of the new methods that has been more widely adopted in the last 12 months has been the virtual event, which is a carbon copy of the real-world event, except created digitally. Not only does this attract the same type of people that came to the old events, the online nature means that they can also open up your business to a whole new audience.
3 Go full on with social media
At the start of 2020, 3.8 billion people worldwide used social media. Now with the decline in face-to-face contact for many of those people, their interaction with the various platforms can only have increased. If your business is to take any steps forward in 2021, taking social media seriously would seem to be a priority.
Producing content for all of these platforms can be time-consuming, especially when you feel you should be concentrating on your business’s core activities. Outsourcing social media to a specialist agency is a popular solution, and not as expensive as many business owners might believe.
Whereas it may take somebody who is not a specialist in social media three hours to create content, it will take somebody with the tools and experience far less time to create potentially far better results. With the first impression your potential customer gets of your company coming via a social media post, it is not an area to take lightly.