Planning for the unknown

Transcript

In this episode, we’re gonna be talking about planning for the unknown.
Hi, and welcome to this episode of so what’s up, we are talking about planning for the unknown. A lot of our clients have got in touch with us recently about just the rapidly changing environment that we’re in at the moment. And they’re struggling to create business plans and tie up the marketing with it. So I’ve got James and Richard here with me. And we’re just going to talk about some different tactics that you can use really to make sure that your marketing doesn’t stop during this time.
Yeah, thanks. So obviously, you know, the big issue we’re seeing is, you know, the changing landscape from a point of view of, I suppose, mainly retail and selling goods. I think we all know that retail has been essentially dead for now a year with the shops been locked down and not be able to open and yeah, what we’ve seen is, businesses are having to very quickly learn something that maybe they didn’t know before, yeah, to find a way to transition to just a different way of selling what they were doing before to just keep them in business. So obviously, from our point of view, is the agency side where we normally the first port of call, and to sort of quickly iterate something for for a client, and to sort of approach a new market or use a new technology, and you’re trying to help that client to overcome that technical challenge.
Majority of the time, this has been through ecommerce, retail clients toying with the idea of going ecommerce pre COVID. And then they’ve kind of been forced down that route, setting up their own site, smaller websites, like say, Make it yourself websites. And then they’ve realised this is actually going to be a long term thing. And they need to focus a lot of their energy on becoming that E commerce business they never planned.
Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s not even just the small businesses. Like for example, there’s a shoemaker in the UK called Crockett and Jones, who are really well known, they’ve been around for many, many years. They never sold ecommerce at all, they used to sell to boutique shops, and like Oxford Street and places like that. And I looked over the weekend, got an email from them said, we in our opinion online store, because we can’t sell our products. Yeah, they’ve actually acknowledged that they are they’ve been in a situation where their role model has led to a point where they physically can’t sell the products that they’ve got in the warehouse. So they’ve had to invest in online store, whilst you know, acknowledging they’re late to the party, because it was never really part of their business plan. But they’ve had to sort of pivot and adopt this as a new way going forwards. And yeah, we’re seeing this across every size of company, from micro companies up to massive companies, everyone’s have to change how they’re adapting to the current situation. And also with having one eye on trying to plan for the future that you don’t know what’s coming down the line.
And people with existing ecommerce businesses, we’ve noticed they’ve scaled quickly, without planning. Yeah, also, there’s been a lot of server hosting changes, website platform upgrades, and, and just focusing on things really tactical that they’d necessarily weren’t planning on doing.
Yeah, I’ll take the, we’re seeing that on people that were already established with E commerce prior to the COVID situation. And people that went ecommerce during COVID are still in that sort of growth ramping up phase, sort of finding the feet, but people that were already established and had a sort of store already, like you say, they’re the ones experiencing major growth issues and thought we did a previous podcast on sort of how to keep your website online, and the reasons why websites tend to crash. And we covered a lot of the points in that around, sort of, you know, at what point does your store need to look at the sort of technical infrastructure to scale up? But say, we are seeing that across our established clients, the smaller clients, they are, yeah, sort of move to it quickly. But then then now trying to work out how best to deal with that. Yeah, in terms of how the how they’re going to market it, how does it affect their marketing plans, what the difference is between what they were doing before and how they’re going to do it now. And all the things that come with that SEO and all the different channels available to them from social media, to email marketing, to paid ads, and everything in between really,
there’s quite a few of our clients as well already established ecommerce players, they know that they know the platform, they know how to how to do ecommerce, basically. And they’ve they’ve taken that opportunity to sit down with a marketing team and to capitalise on the new revenue streams really, and the sheer volume of people now going ecommerce, and they’ve they’ve done really well out of it.
Yeah, I mean, we’ve seen a couple of clients I can think off the top my head who actually it’s been a massive saviour for them, really, you know, where their old revenue streams have dried up and their ecommerce haven’t been established or was sort of right at that already in that sort of growth phase is completely picked up the slack in terms of the business that they weren’t going to get in the first place. And now it’s going to be their sort of main springboard for the future in terms of how do they adapt their marketing to use that as their primary channel. I mean, Chelsea young because we’ve run a few sessions with clients, haven’t we in terms of how they can sort of best sort of monetize and sort of use sort of conversion rate optimization to improve what they’ve already got?
Yeah, definitely. So I think one thing I would say about some of the clients that we’ve been working with, some of them, especially those larger established ones have been used to do in the kind of deliberate market planning where you plan for the next three years, you have like specific objectives, like you’ve got your SMART goals and that sort of thing that they are used to objectifying and reporting against. But now, because of the, of the regulations we’ve got, and how the platforms are changing all the time, as well. And Facebook is constantly updating Google’s constantly updating and iterating. It’s actually super hard to do these kind of free year plans, because we do not know what the digital landscape will look like in three years. So it’s almost training the clients to think of this emergent planning, as it’s called, where you actually go from having set objectives to thinking about Iterative sprints, and looking at kind of how you can make the most of how the channels are working now experimenting more so than they ever have done before getting them feeling safe and kind of looking at different ways to actually optimise the platforms and stuff for them as they stand now, and being much more tactical rather than strategic, I’d say.
Yeah, so it’s being more innovative about how you look at things, and also taking yourself out of the, I suppose the Yeah, everyone’s used to this sort of tried and tested way. Yeah, what’s the Yeah, what’s the phrase for it? So yeah, it’s, you know, you look at a three year plan and go, Well, we have to do that plan, execute it that way. But I think it’s being comfortable with the fact that that might not work out that way. And maybe a three month plans, as far as you can go before something changes, again, I think actually, that takes some getting your head around for a business that’s maybe not used to doing things that way. But that’s actually where a good relationship with whichever sort of third parties that you’re working with, whether it be agency or consultants, that are sort of working your business with you to have that sort of communication in place, so that you can do a few months sprint, then actually go this isn’t working, or this is changing. So let’s maybe go down this route. And you can still sort of measure it with objectives. But yeah, the actual actionable tactical ways of getting there, again, to be very, very different and have to, you know, be responsive, depending on market conditions. And just what’s happening almost on a week by week basis.
Yeah, definitely, I’d say objectives are definitely important. And having that kind of set vision of where you want the business to be, and having growth targets in mind, but not necessarily getting to them in the ways that you thought you originally were going to get to them with. So for example, some of the clients that we had, they had kind of like a hybrid model of digital and using third party suppliers and not being truly direct to consumer. Whereas now a lot of the third party providers and like, small farm shops have a revenue ways that they were getting things in, they will have to close down now because of COVID. And people aren’t getting that footfall into bricks and mortar stores. So they’ve had to become a true e commerce direct to consumer platform. And that’s the only way now that their products are selling.
That’s right. I think, you know, the phrase, the best use for it is really this horizon scanning aspects where you sort of looking at what’s coming over the horizon, but obviously, you can’t see too far ahead of yourself at the moment, you know, we don’t know in three months time, will all the restrictions of COVID Be relaxed? And will all the shops be open? Or we may not? So So right now, it’s very difficult to sort of predict what’s going to happen when and I think also, you know, not only just the sort of practicalities, but the technology aspect of things. Yeah, we as an agency that primarily focuses on Web and Digital has to be looking ahead to say, Okay, so we’re working on this platform now. But is this platform going to be there in five years time? And try to sort of keep ahead of the game to say, actually, yeah, we are looking into what the next thing is, so that when clients come to us and say, What should I be investing in? We’re giving them the best advice that we can. And this applies to social media and paid ads and every other media channel that exists, yeah, we have to be trying to look at what’s coming down the road, how do we help customers take advantage of it at the right point, maybe not too early, maybe just when it’s at a point where it’s commercially viable for them, and try and help them from there. And it is quite difficult to plan too far ahead at the moment.
I think there’s a beauty in that though, because when you actually look at kind of the topsy turvy environment that we’re in at the minute, and then you look back on previous ones that we’ve had about like the 2008 crash and the.com crash and all of the other kind of downturn recessions that we’ve been in uncertainly actually brings about like true innovation and people it because people are so short sighted in what they’re actually looking for the taking the time to really iterate and get down into the granular details and start thinking about some of the some of the ways that we’ve traditionally done things and is a viable way in the future like, look at the last time we had a crash, we had some really good companies like Airbnb come out of them and just completely rocked, like completely rocked up the market of what was on offer beforehand.
Although if we if we flip this on its head, we’re primarily focusing on digital retail product based companies. But only the other day, I was chatting to quite a bit big building company, and this is the polar opposite side. So they they’re planning for the unknown. They’re not planning for the unknown, that absolutely chaotic and flat out because nobody’s spending on holidays, everybody’s got money in the bank. So everybody’s gone into construction, doing work on the house, doing landscaping, etc. So that’s another sector that is really benefited from it. But there was no sort of planning. It’s just they’re all extremely busy now. So retail is struggling, but service sector, especially building and trades there, they’re all flat out
there a good example. So if you think back maybe 18 months, that company potentially had a three year plan in terms of how things were going to go. That plan now is either completely out the window or inaccurate at best, because like you say they’ve gone busy because people are Yeah, we’ve got more disposable money to spend on what they’re doing, which is to completely change their whole logistics and how their business works. And they couldn’t plan for that. Well, they
rely on retail for supplies, which has been another reactive. The typical example, nobody could get plaster or plaster board, for example, which is a crazy thing. But that stopped the service trade and relied on retail. So the likes of Travis Perkins overnight, really drastically increased their ecommerce conversions, and have massively focused on that now where they used to be bricks and mortar, go into the store, have a conversation over haggle and buy your products,
I say, but I think because they adapted quickly, that they have sort of come through this, you know, pretty well for them. But I think you know, companies that didn’t, obviously, yeah, they may have had a plan, but they didn’t adapt that plan quick enough to then accommodate the changing environment. They’re the ones right now who are actually the ones that are struggling and going out of business, and maybe not won’t be back again. It’s people that are agile can can see that things need to change and have the mindset to quickly change that. They’re the ones that actually we’re seeing are having the best growth at the moment. Yeah, and you’re
still you’re still limited by the supply chain. That’s what we found. So people are having massive success online, we’ve got another customer who’s an aquarium business. They sell parts for aquariums in the pet industry, and they’ve had a massive boom in E commerce sales, it’s been absolutely amazing for them, the retail shops that would normally buy on buying from them. But everybody else including Amazon are buying in bulk, but their manufacturing supply chain, especially with things like Brexit, at the same time as COVID has been affected for the raw materials and the parts needed. So I think the bigger picture, nobody planned for even the manufacturers. Yeah. And with them, the manufacturer restrictions aren’t their capacity to manufacture their raw material needed in many different industries. It tends to be down to staffing, safe staffing, is what is what’s caused the backlog in a way,
I think actually is worse, it’s a sort of a really bad situation as well, where you’ve got sort of those supply chain issues. It’s an opportunity for those businesses to use their social media to engage their customers in a positive way. And being really authentic and honest and say, Look, yeah, hey, guys, look, we’re good. But we can’t get these products to you because of x and y. Bear with us. And we’ll do what we can. And actually, they could turn it into a good conversation to build some good brand loyalty going forward. If people see that company is really working its hardest to try and get over those challenges on behalf of its own customers. It just gives them a different opportunity to use digital marketing to then reach out to their existing customer base and have a conversation that they weren’t having before or what conversation that may be without the company’s input was sort of just being taken online into a complaint environment, you know, sort of our TripAdvisor kind of style.
Yeah, I think definitely worth this one thing that I would say about brands and not actually having the answers at the moment is crisis management is a massive thing and actually engaging with any negative comments that you get on there. Obviously, people are going to want to air their concerns, especially in the kind of environment that we live in today. Everyone thinks that our opinion is super valid and they deserve to be listened to and I think acknowledging them and doing so in a in a professional way, being super authentic about it honest and transparent about the difficulties that you’re facing. Maybe even like if you know that you’re going to face supply challenges, actually pre empting that with people writing a blog and putting it out on your social media to kind of pre warn people that may be their favourite products or their their long term like long term buy Are gonna, you’re gonna struggle with them. And I think because of everything that is going on in the world at the moment, people appreciate the honesty and no one’s gonna, well, no one normal would really kick off about something that isn’t your fault. If you explain about all of the challenges that you’re facing.
Transparency is key, isn’t it? One of the industries I think have reacted really well, or should I say quickly to is the automotive industry. So buying a car, over video chat, or without even seeing the car seems to be a thing now, but they’ve all gone digital, everybody’s online, everybody that the salesmen are no longer face to face, and I’ll do videos. And they’re being open and honest about delivery timescales, things have slipped because of Brexit and COVID. But they’ve been open and honest from the very start, and you’re buying a virtual product. So there’s something about buying a car remotely or virtual, that makes you think, actually, I’m okay to wait for that. Now.
It’s really interesting. Well, they’ve actually started transitioning to the phrasing, buy your car online. Now. I think it’s an advertising everything is becoming a thing where people will now then start to think, Oh, it’s okay to buy a car online. And maybe two years ago, no one thought you just go online and buy a car. Well look at
that as well. So you’re buying a car, it’s getting delivered to your door. There’s no contact throughout the whole process. And then it’s just crazy. But that’s what
Tesla’s been doing for Young’s now like they’ve never actually had full on for courts, they’ve always been centred in like shopping malls. And that is where you’ve actually bought a Tesla from if it is something that you’ve wanted to do. So again, they were really cool company that were ahead of the curve in this.
Yeah, I think, you know, the only downside was people are really assistant on test driving a car, I can imagine that’s quite tricky. But you know, on the whole, yeah, which cars are necessarily bad nowadays? You know, it’s not like it was 1980s, where you sort of just drive a new car and think it was Roby? Does he just don’t tend to get it now. I think use cars is all different thing, obviously. But yeah, talking about new purchases, obviously, you know, everyone finances, I think, yeah, historically, in the world of E commerce, we’ve always sort of said that the higher ticket items don’t ecommerce very well, because of people’s ability to make the transaction, whether they didn’t have enough credit card limit, or they have the means to pay at the end of a transaction thing, but obviously cars now, you know, 80 90% financed? Yeah, so I think you know, it’s the perfect industry really to test out this buying online thing for big ticket items, because virtually nobody pays in real money for them.
I’ve done both. In the show, I’ve done I bought a used car, digitally, and it got delivered, which was a great experience. And I’ve just, just this week, gone for a new car, digitally never seen it never drove it never sat in it, which is a weird experience, because I am that guy who wants to test drive a car just to see how it is. But I’ve bitten the bullet. It’s the only way of doing it. So I’ve gone for E commerce style carbine, which was a very different experience. And even the sales guy I’ve dealt with, I’ve not seen, I’ve heard one phone call and the rest has been done by email. It’s it takes away the haggling ability, though I Still haikal Still got a good deal, James. You know why?
But obviously, that’s just a good example of an industry that’s looked at what’s coming down the road, they’ve changed tax very quickly. And I’m sure they never thought that in 2021 They’d be primarily selling cars online, versus their dealerships. I’m sure nobody two years ago thought that that was the case. I won’t complain I heard for that. No. So yeah, I think if everyone keeps an open mind and you know, looks at changing tactics and sort of takes advice and looks at their Oh, yeah, all the technology that’s available to them to do this. And actually people can be really successful in areas I never thought about before.
Yeah, definitely. Um, one thing I would add to that is, just like the power of social media is literally a platform where you as a business owner can go out there and just maybe even if you just lurk to see what people are actually talking about, you don’t have to join in the conversations, if you don’t really want to add, I’d encourage anyone to join in the conversations and actually get your brand name out there. But just actually having that untapped resource of what people are actually talking about that is about your industry. It’s, it’s amazing, really, that you actually have access to real time conversations to give you that knowledge straightaway. I mean,
that our most successful clients are the ones where are where the people running the business are essentially the demographic client themselves. So they understand that that their market because they live their market, they build
their communities online, they’re really popular Facebook groups, pages, etc. And they live and breathe the communities majority of the time, they don’t have to actually administer them. The people on the communities answer the questions that are needed, but they just keep a close eye on it just to see what people are talking about and maybe what people want in the future as well. Yeah,
and it helps them especially like some of the ones that I’ve got in mind. It helps them with planning new products, new product development, must save them absolutely tonnes on like r&d because they’re literally just listening to what the social
listening, it’s actually tools out there to do that.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, if you’ve got a good enough community that I don’t think you even need to spend a lot of money on the tools, because you’ve got literally people they’re asking you and telling you what they want and giving,
asking and telling each other and doing a sat on the sideline listening.
That’s right. I think, you know, the people, the Intelligent Business owners should really be looking at this and saying, Actually, a lot of our work can be done for us by our well invested clients, you know, the customers that really bought into our brand. And yeah, want to engage with us. And I think, Yeah, as long as there’s a bit of a two way engagement at some point as well, where they, the people that support your brand, also feel like they’ve, they’re getting something back, yeah, they’re valued and appreciated, then I think, actually, it’s a great model really, for people to look at, especially when it’s sort of trying to tap into new areas or just need to run an idea pass their community, but it just, you know, it ticks all the boxes of authentic and genuine conversation that actually all social media networks are looking for at the moment as well. So there’s really no drawbacks to it.
When you’re talking about a conversation, a conversation used to be for a lot of businesses they’ve they’ve done not just change the way they do business, but the customer service aspect of it. So the call centre, telephone based businesses who are used to getting inquiries over the phone has made a massive shift now, because it’s well known that people will just fill in a form, expect an email back or go on to a live chat. So these people that start with their headsets on all day everyday, and also on chat clients chatting away, which is a whole new technology to get used to. But it can make things more efficient. As we all know, it’s quite easy to convert over the phone a lot easier. You get to know the person you can have a conversation, emails and messaging takes a lot longer to learn as well and to answer the questions they need. So but a lot of businesses now people have got so used to being digital, that they communicate and say I’ve chatted to this person you assumed was a phone call. But that what they actually meant was it was a whatsapp or a messenger message to the
group. But sometimes as well, I want one thing I’ve noticed and kind of like the luxury markets as well. So you know how like, on our website, you click on and we’ve got like a chat about the Teach free to Facebook, some of the high end companies for luxury products, you click on their chat, and it opens up a zoom call, and you literally can see the person that you’re talking to. And that’s next level. Yeah, it’s next level is for kind of like I think sonar, Stuart’s is gonna
say, What have you been buying a Rolex watch a yacht, JP, you should know
more about this. And it’s literally just, I just read blogs about them, I can’t afford them myself.
That would totally freak me out. The fact that you’re here to here to bottom live in front of you straightaway. So I’ve seen a few. If you’re in your pants up,
I have seen a few bit there are a few live chat products out there that support that kind of video messaging aspect to it. But again, obviously depends on the company behind it is only willing to have operators, they’re there all the time. I think sometimes you interacting, actually, you’re interacting with the bot, you don’t entirely know because they’re getting a lot cleverer nowadays and a lot more natural in terms of language. And some of them, some of them, some of them are beyond terrible run. You spend your life just trying to confuse them. But they’re the ones that but you’ve seen during the working from home sort of revolution, there’s been an awful lot of people work from home for companies that are essentially just Manning live chat systems, you know, HMRC, for example, I’ve got teams of people just Manning live chat at all working from home. Yeah, so they say it’s become really one of their primary ways of communicating with people for all sorts of government departments. And so the more it becomes normalised, the more everyone will expect it. And I think, you know, nowadays, if you’re an e commerce Store, or a company that relies on people inquiring, because maybe the products a bit technical, and you haven’t got any form of sort of live chat, I think you’re missing a massive trick, because, yeah, people are just used to asking now, and we’ve seen this 10 years ago, we thought we were implementing this on websites, you know, for people that have got a particularly tacky product that maybe before the person buys the need to ask a bit of advice about Yeah, will it fit this? Will it? Is this this size? Yeah, what’s it made of that kind of stuff. And it’s really become normalised for every query now, more. So I would say then contact forms, because people don’t like submitting a form. And then hoping someone replies back in the timescale, a fancy word of a spam
filter. Also, at the same time, there is a downside to that. So in the past, for example, you’d make an inquiry, you chat to a person who is in a building, or should I say, even in the team, who can give you advice? Now you ask the question, if they don’t know the question, they’ve got to dial the other person who’s at home, in another location, the community internal communication is a little bit a little bit broken. Whereas whereas before, that people would all be working together. So
we thought we had this the other day because when you were looking for the cars, we didn’t live chat anyway. And the guy clearly didn’t know what you
marry. So don’t call another person. Yeah, who’s based at home as well. We’re all remote work. And so I can’t answer that. But another person can answer that. But they’re not available in it because they’re at home, whereas normally, they will just shout it across the desk. So yeah,
so there’s drawbacks to it. But I think, you know, on the whole, it’s one of those communication tools that, you know, people have really started to think it’s just a standard now, on everything. Yeah, it’s gonna become expected. Yeah, a lot of things in digital world sort of start off as sort of a novelty starts to be picked up by people and become expected and become a given as time goes on. And I certainly think that things like live chat communication, to sort of facilitate a an E commerce transaction right now is me you crazy? If you haven’t got it on your website, I think,
yeah, there’s a few people I’ve got, I’m not going to name a particular company. But trying to deal with a particular company we’ve dealt with several times lately. They’ve they’ve struggled with the amount of inbound inquiries. So they’ve done a knee jerk COVID reaction. So we’ve closed the phone lines. Now we’re no longer available on the phone lines, but you can get us on the live chat. That’s an actual bot, that doesn’t work. So it’s just it’s just one of these crazy things that the customer service disappears out the window. And it was quite a substantial purchase that I can’t to this day still purchase because they don’t reply to emails. And they they require all inquiries through a bot that doesn’t work, a chat on their website. So it’s a big learning curve for some. And as a larger company, you’d expect it to work. But believe it or not, they don’t. VW, for example, last week, I was on their website, they launched the cars I’ve looked at it got the shot, I was I was a perfect client. For them. I had full intent. I’ve been subscribed to the newsletter for some time. I clicked on it went to the website, it didn’t work. The live chat functionality that implemented on the website didn’t work at the moment, they certainly shut down. And you would assume they had all their ducks in the row. And they know exactly what they
do. And you always think these big companies have got things sewn up. But in our experience that a lot of them struggle with the same issues that smaller companies do. If and small companies sometimes are quicker to respond to some of these things.
Yeah, we’ve had that before, where we’ve had to go through what quite a quite a well known brand, quite a large brand, have gone to their website and just picked it for bugs. And we spent a whole day and we’ve had a full spreadsheet full of bugs on the website. And the bugs get reported by the customer. But it’s such a process internally for them to get them bugs fixed that they never do. Well, this
is a finger I think in terms of like coming back to planning for the unknown. One thing that I’ve noticed is, especially with bigger clients, they’re actually a lot more difficult to help them to pivot or like plan for the unknown, or get them into this iterative way of thinking. Because being so big, you’ve got so many different stakeholders, you’ve got so many different people with like key opinions that they need to have things signed off internally. It’s almost like an impenetrable force, you actually can’t get them
as an agency, the other side of it, how reactive of that agency? Yeah, how much resource have they got to allocate at the drop of a hat.
And then when you actually bring it back down to kind of like smaller teams and some of the smaller businesses that we’ve worked with, like we can actually get them like some of them, they’ve come to us pretty quickly like, right, we’ve got this need, we need to get online because we’ve got this business need. You’re working with the business owner. And within a few weeks, it’s been signed off and completed. And then we’ve got that pretty much sorted for them. It’s almost like sometimes for the bigger companies, it’s hard for them to actually get things done at the speed that I think in this world now we actually need to do things in Yeah, it’s
the smaller ones that are a bit more nimble and reactive. Yeah, the ones succeeding taking market share, which is, which is great, because we’ve seen some of our clients. They’ve just rocketed. They’ve done absolutely fantastic and the capitalised and everything, and the top of Google for search terms, they’ve gotten all out on social media, their advertising spends up but they’ve done absolutely amazing ways the larger companies have lost that market share to the smaller companies.
Yeah, because they’re so stuck on this three year plan that they created two years ago.
There’s also more layers of bureaucracy and bigger companies. There’s more target setting. And there’s more people that are worried about missing targets, because actually, there’s no no one’s telling at the top. It’s okay, we understand things have got to change. And so everyone sticks rigidly by what their original plan was, even though it clearly was never going to happen. The automotive
industry is a typical one, isn’t it? We know quite a few people in the industry, and they’re just not reacting quick enough. They just fell over stuff. They stay at home. How are we going to sell a car? I don’t know. Just start there.
Yeah. 100%. Any they don’t know anything else? And it’s difficult to get them out of that. But yeah, I think he’s coming back to auto original point around planning for the unknown. Yeah, I think if you’re a small company, you don’t need to plan for the unknown. You just need to be reactive to what’s going on really and just but still be in control of your business and understand that you’re not going to make rash decisions and do things sort of on a knee jerk. But what you are going to change the things that you know are going to be responsive to the situation at hand.
Now focus offline now and push hard to grow your ecommerce platform, let’s say and then when everything returns to normal, hopefully that will be very soon. Your retail store Hold on boom as well.
Yeah, definitely, if you’ve kept up you kind of ongoing content and brand awareness and stuff, while everything’s been going, can think of some great small businesses that have been doing this and pushing some services online and some in the beauty industry, they obviously can’t do their core services, like, you know, like molecules and like massages and stuff like that. They can’t do it for they’re actually making quite a lot of money out of selling some of the products that they would use on the massages, like the massage oils, like some of the colours and stuff so people can do their own nails, then the creating content, like how to do your own nails and stuff online and just engaging the community knowing full well that when they’re allowed to open back up, they’ve got probably a bigger audience than they had done before because of how they’ve been nurturing people through the lockdown.
And clicking collectors is a big one as well. So you got many people that just love retail, and they’ve had to move to click and collect but they will be the people returning to retail.
Yeah, definitely. But yeah, I think in terms of planning for the unknown, then I think if you have any questions about how we can help you if you’ve got anything that you’re particularly stuck on at the moment, if you just want to run some ideas, buyers and have some marketing chat, just get in touch with us at Hello at so marketing.com