As the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to unfold globally, we are all finding ourselves impacted. Countless small businesses across the world have been forced to temporarily close their doors and the economic consequences of this crisis will continue to disrupt our daily lives for the foreseeable future.
Razorfrog is reaching out to everyone — both in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond — to offer assistance during this challenging time. Fortunately, our small team is in good health and is practicing social distancing by working remotely from home to combat transmission. We continue to keep our virtual doors open as normal to do whatever is necessary to help our community and clients with their immediate needs, as well as serving their long term web design and online marketing goals.
At this time we have a few suggestions to offer, which we’d be happy to discuss further with you.
Five Practical Ideas For Your Small Business
- Keep your customers informed via email campaigns. Send out an email campaign of your own letting your clients and community know what’s going on. If you have an email system set up already, we can help with any details to send that out. If you don’t, we can help quickly set up new email software. If you have an email list of contacts that haven’t specifically opted in to receive emails, we’ve seen many exceptions in the last two weeks to normal spam guidelines.
- Provide informational updates on your site’s homepage or company blog. Include any new, relevant information about your business’ hours, special precautions, new policies, etc that your customers should be aware of.
- Post relevant updates across social media accounts. Provide those who follow you with similar updates as to your website. While we don’t usually offer social media marketing assistance, we’ll help out where we can.
- Set up or update gift card sales for retail and hospitality businesses. Many people in our community have shared their desire to help support small businesses with cash now through gift card sales, for use in a few months when life returns to normal.
- Revisit SEO goals relevant to COVID-19. Make any specific text/content updates for changes on your site. Normally Google takes 1-2 weeks to update indexing, but we’ve been starting to use instant-indexing features that can turn that into a few hours.
Additional Suggestions and Resources
The US Chamber of Commerce has prepared a fantastic guide that includes CDC-recommended tips for helping small businesses cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. You can access the guide here: Coronavirus: 8 Things Your Small Business Needs To Do.
We also recommend reviewing these additional articles published by the USCC: Coronavirus Best Practices For Small Businesses and 9 Creative Ways Small Businesses Are Adapting to Coronavirus.
Keeping The Human Touch
If you need help with implementing any ideas mentioned here, or perhaps are interested in brainstorming other possibilities for your website and business, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. If you’d prefer to chat over a video call during this period of isolation, we welcome that as well.
Thank you for continuing to place your trust in us. We wish you continued good health and safety during these uncertain times.
