What started with panic buying has now turned into a routine of restrictions. The initial shock of COVID-19 is over, but the pandemic is here to keep disrupting business as you knew it.
Companies’ perspectives quickly changed; long-term objectives were abandoned for short-term goals. Businesses re-evaluated their priorities and updated their contingency plans. Tracking costs has turned into a daily routine.
If you haven’t already done so, this is the time to rethink your internal processes. Address challenges directly, and dare to restructure with unconventional solutions. Creativity goes a long way in times of crisis. You may find advantages you didn’t anticipate.
Managing teams has become particularly challenging during the pandemic. With less staff available and team members working from home at odd hours, coordinating everybody can be an issue. Here are a few tips on how to get more out of your software tools:
Leverage advanced functions of your meeting software. Advanced meeting software provides functions enabling participants to interact. Zoom, Microsoft Team, BlueJeans, Webex, and others enable team members to collaborate in one place. Zoom, for example, has a whiteboard function that participants can access simultaneously. In a brainstorming session, each contributor can add their ideas. Slack offers a similar option, where participants can mark things on the screen shared by another user. Zoom also offers a breakout room, meaning the meeting participants can break into smaller groups.
Manage external service providers with your team-management tool. Platforms such as Asana, Monday, Trello, or Jira are intuitive and easy to learn. They include project management tools, and you can assign tasks, track progress, and set deadlines. They allow for file-sharing, pop-up notifications, instant messaging, and more. You can manage external service providers and subcontractors by giving them limited access to specific functions or integrate with their systems. This way, someone outside your company can work as an integrated part of your team.
Use online time tracking software. Team members sign-in remotely wherever they are. They can allocate their hours to specific projects or tasks. The tools can track which file someone is working on. Systems such as Toggle and Clockify report directly to your accounting.
Since the beginning of the corona crisis, the use of digital devices has increased significantly. Users watch more shows, play more games, spend more time on social media, communicate more, and shop more online. Digital marketing is a way to leverage this to your advantage. Meet your prospects, where they spend time.
At the same time, you need to be more efficient than ever to overcome the difficulties of home office work and financial challenges. Here are a few tips to increase efficiency and save cost:
Automize more processes. With marketing automation software, you can easily expand your marketing activities, make them more efficient, reliable, trackable, and increase ROI.
Do less paid advertising and focus more on SEO. Spend less money on paid advertising and more time generating organic traffic.
Increase email marketing. Email marketing is still the most successful marketing channel with low costs.
Engage more on social media. People spend more time on social media, especially during a lockdown or when quarantined. Create quizzes, ask questions, make raffles, or anything that encourages your audience to engage.
Building a strategy for digital marketing during the pandemic and implementing it should be among your new priorities. With people not socializing and keeping distance, the future is digital.
Extra time and effort to create and optimize your digital marketing may not be available to you at the moment. Here’s where an agency can help. A marketing agency has a staff of professionals for each aspect of marketing: SEO experts, marketing automation specialists, professional content writers, digital marketing professionals, experienced developers, and other marketing operations roles.
Chances are, you will need a little bit of everything. When you hire SR Pro’s service, you get to take advantage of each member's expertise. This saves you time and assures professional quality.
Using a marketing agency is like hiring an entire marketing team for a short period until things run smoothly. If you already have a marketing strategy, the temporary team can optimize your processes and keep them running. You don't have to cut down your marketing activity due to staff deficiency.
At SR Pro, we can take on all the responsibilities of marketing operations and help you create a digital marketing strategy, implement it, and keep optimizing.
We assign the relevant professionals per your needs. Our internal system is fully transparent. You receive a daily report showing the precise tasks that were performed and assignments that were completed.
This lets you scale the marketing activities according to your budget. We can carry out a one-time project or work on an ongoing basis a few hours per day or per week, depending on your marketing activities' scope.
One thing is for sure; you need a strong presence on the internet to get through the COVID-19 crisis. Follow the tips in this post to manage your team efficiently. Leverage automation and digital marketing to ensure you reach your customers where they spend most of their time.
Contact us here: info@SRpro.marketing, for an audit and get the best offer.