3 No-Cost Things You Can Do to Grow Your Business During Challenging Times

“Lost time is never found again.”

Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father of the United States

I hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy in the midst of this COVID-19 pandemic. We had our Marketing Accountability Call yesterday. It was a great call and I have decided to share what we talked about so that you can use these 3 no-cost steps to grow your business during challenging times.

We started off the call by talking about what’s going on in our businesses and lives as a result of the shutdowns. The most common challenges are:

• Figuring out how to communicate with and serve clients virtually
• Managing the stress
• Learning how to look at this situation in a positive way

Our conversation reminded me of a video I saw a couple of weeks ago on Facebook from Simon Bowen.

Here’s the video. I highly recommend taking a few minutes to watch it to learn about how to be a “green line” business owner.

(The business owners in my Marketing Accountability Program are truly Green Line business owners!)

There was a unanimous agreement among our group that everyone wanted to take advantage of the extra downtime and used it wisely to move closer to their goals.

Here are the 3 No-Cost Ways to Grow Your Business in Challenging Times

In order to help you figure out where to shift this month, I’ve put together a 3 step process. These are actionable steps that don’t take a lot of Time or Money to accomplish!

Phase 1: Protect

In this phase, we want to protect our health and mindset as well as our revenue.

You know what to do to protect your health. 🙂 Stay home. Wash your hands. Get your sleep. Don’t eat your feelings. Get some exercise. Drink your water. Reduce your sugar intake. Turn off the news, journal, meditate, pray, etc.

Protecting your revenue includes making sure your existing clients are taken care of. That may be as simple as providing a bit of extra value during these difficult times. It also involves balancing your books and making sure you’re not letting your expenses get out of control. If you need financial help, there are many resources here for funding for small businesses in this article on Forbes.

Phase 2: Prepare

Phase 2 is preparing your messaging and offers to address the urgent needs that your potential clients have today. Talking about lofty dreams on your website, when your clients are struggling to cover their basics, may come across as insensitive. At times like these, your potential clients may be in fear. They need hope and reassurance that everything is going to be okay.

In this phase, you also want to address your offers. Take a look at your existing offers. Are they helping to fix, prevent, or improve your client’s situation? When people are in a fear state they are more likely to look for something to fix their problem or remove their pain. Prevention and improvement are not their pressing needs.

Maybe your offers need to be tweaked to include more value. Do your lead magnets need to change? Maybe there’s a whole new “triage” type offer your clients need at this time. If you’re not sure, host a call with a few of your best clients and ask how you can help!

Phase 3: Position

This is where everyone was focusing on our call. Positioning is essential but it’s also important to make sure you’re protecting and planning. Once those bases are covered, step back, look at your businesses, make changes, finish projects, etc.

What can you do now to position your business so that you can capitalize on the success when the market turns around? Take a look at your infrastructure, like your website, marketing funnels, email follow-ups, etc. What can you do to streamline and improve them? Are there processes you can improve on, like a client onboarding automation? Or maybe you can create some content ahead of time to fill your LinkedIn or Instagram queue!

You can do a lot for little to no cost to grow your business, even when the economy is challenging.

Because of everyone’s desire to stay focused on making the most of this time, we’ll be focusing on productivity and self-discipline for entrepreneurs in the Marketing Accountability Program this month. The Get Marketing Momentum program is all about helping you grow your business. We have a live Zoom workshop training and a live Implementation Q&A Coaching call each month focused on proven ways to grow your business.

I hope you’ll join me in taking these 3 steps to grow our business and reach our goals!

Let’s all look back months from now thankful we made the best use of this extra downtime.

Wishing you health, hope, and happiness!

Heather