When you run an independent business in the travel, leisure or hospitality industries, you are well versed in the art of spinning plates.

What few of us are prepared for is having an outside force smash those plates, suddenly and without warning. 

While Coronavirus is having a devastating impact on many businesses in the sector, we’re encouraging you to look ahead and keep on talking to your audience. In this article, we’re sharing how to keep talking to your customers in a crisis and why it matters now. 

An opportunity: to diversify

It feels like we are in the middle of the storm, but in fact we’ve probably not yet reached the epicentre yet, with the peak of the outbreak not expected for another 12 weeks or so. It’s important to remember that although it might feel like the end is nigh, it isn’t. 

It can’t be easy for most of us who rely on our business or income so completely: diversification in the event of lockdown is the only answer. While your bricks and mortar premises may be closed temporarily to the public, you’re almost certainly going to be working up schemes and options that you can operate from home, online or via delivery services. 

Be present now for a brighter future

Looking beyond the current crisis to what happens next means continuing to maintain a presence now. Don’t risk losing all that profile you’ve built up over the years by going quiet when it really matters.

Overnight, we’ve seen technical innovations from traditional service businesses that include:-

• A country pub offering a home delivery service (of wine and beer too, if you order food)

• Dance and pilates instructors running live classes online 

• A choir singing together from their individual sitting rooms 

• A pop singer streaming gigs from home instead of going on tour

• Remotely located team hosting virtual lunch workouts and daily push-up challenges (we’re in!)

• GP surgeries offering virtual appointments. This service has been much debated in the past few years and now, suddenly, it is possible. Could one good thing to come out of this be streamlined health services, saving countless man-hours for doctors and their patients?

So if you’re a restaurant, wedding business, hotel or holiday company…

• What do you do when the doors literally close to your paying public? 

• How do you keep on talking to your audience when everything is changing and you don’t know what’s coming next?

How to keep talking to your customers in a crisis

Go back to basics on social media

Use the magic of tech to keep the conversation going. Not that you’re ever using social media channels to sell (are you?!), now’s the time to broaden the conversation and be truly social again. 

Talk about things that matter to you and your target customer, and keep building your profile in a sympathetic, positive way. Avoid being downbeat or too personal - you’re the face of a business and you need to keep a watch that your brand values continue to be represented in a professional manner, whatever private situation you are facing. 

Perhaps now is the time to

• Kickstart that community group you’ve always wanted to launch

• Offer services in your local area to help others

• Set up a virtual networking group

• Run live online cook-alongs

• Brush up your skills and share your learnings

• Host a ‘virtual vino’ wine tasting session

• Participate in live Q&A sessions on your area of expertise 

Keep talking to the media

Does traditional media want to hear about anything other than COVID-19?

Short answer, yes. While there is ad space to sell, there are pages to fill. As upside down as it may seem, as more advertising space is sold, more space for stories is created because new pages are added to the physical edition that goes to print. And as none of us readers can cope with an unmitigated stream of doom and gloom - journalists need uplifting, entertaining content too.

Plan for a healthier, travel-packed future

While we’re in isolation, we’ll console ourselves looking at pretty pictures of places to go and dishes to sample. Within the next few months, people will be recovering from Coronavirus. We’ll not only have flattened the curve, but will have moved past it too. And when we’re free of all this, you can bet that people will be very keen for a change of scenery and will be getting out there again. The cogs of business will start churning and whirring and gradually, we’ll return to a new kind of normal.

Keep talking. Keep marketing.

So don’t stop talking to your customers. Over the next few weeks we’ll be writing specifically about how to engage with your audiences on Insta, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and email in a time of business crisis.

In the meantime, stay safe, keep on washing those hands and drop us a line here or on Instagram if you need help with any of the above or just a reputation management sounding board for your diversification idea.