It’s summertime in beautiful BC and we should be talking about fun in the sun. With fires raging, high temperatures, drought, and a resurgence of COVID, we’ve instead got contingency planning on our minds. Every business should have a plan to guide them through an emergency, and the current state of affairs is a good reminder to make sure it’s up to date. As the saying goes, hope for the best, but plan for the worst.
Prepared BC has a number of resources on their website. For small businesses, there’s this guide as well as a plan template. Reading through it, we realized that there are several ways that we can help our clients manage and recover from a crisis.
- If you host your website with us, it’s automatically backed up every two weeks to an off-site location. That means that we can keep your site online even if your operations are disrupted. If you have back-end info stored, like customer email addresses that might be added to frequently, we also offer a daily back-up service.
- We can help you communicate with your customers by quickly changing your website. Changing the contact phone number from your office to your cell, for example, or redirecting the message form to a different email address, will allow customers to continue ordering products or making appointments for services. If your site includes a database of customers or suppliers, we can also email them directly to keep them up to date on your situation.
- You may also want to pause your regular advertising campaign, or start a new one to quickly boost revenue. Perhaps you were able to escape a wildfire with a truck load of products and are prepared to sell them at a discount in your new location. Or maybe you have a mobile business and want to find customers in a different community. A search engine marketing (SEM or PPC) campaign could keep you going.
- When you are back to business as usual, an ad blitz, say SEM, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, will let all of your customers know, and maybe even attract some new ones.
If you’re one of the lucky ones who hasn’t been impacted and you see opportunities to give back, we can also help you make the most of your goodwill. If you’re donating a product, service, or your time, we can help you get the word out. Sharing your good deeds can inspire others to help out too.
