Transforming to Digital: Is Your Business Prepared for a Potential Second Wave of COVID-19?

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected almost all verticals on a global scale. The Canadian government offered a quick COVID-19 response to help businesses of all sizes.

However, despite the helpful programs, many businesses experienced a significant revenue drop. Some of them even went bankrupt.

To adjust to the new environment, many businesses have made pivots and increased their online presence.

Today, many businesses have reopened. However, even with the addition of protocols to prevent the spread of the virus, many experts say that there is a potential for a second wave of COVID-19.

With that in mind, perhaps now is the perfect time to think about how to prepare your business for a potential second wave.

Business Surviving the COVID Pandemic

The first wave of the COVID pandemic will have a long-lasting economic effect. Anyhow, you managed to go through the storm and keep your business open.

While your business is making adjustments for the new environment, perhaps this is a great time to revisit your strategies and see how you can capture new opportunities that arise from the new environment.

As mentioned in our previous article, we should never let a crisis go to waste; as the bigger the crisis, the bigger the opportunity will be.

Before you can kick start a digital transformation, you need a plan, and the best way to devise a plan is to take a look at your processes.

Complete a business-during-COVID-19 case study to identify all the bottlenecks, challenges, and gaps in your strategy and execution exposed by the novel coronavirus, and implement changes that will mitigate disruptions in the future and have positive effects to your business even post-COVID-19.

To read about how businesses will likely evolve due to the pandemic, check out our blog post here.

Revisit Your Online Presence, Reinvent Your Business, and Identify New Market Trends

Most businesses that came through the COVID-19 pandemic have used online services to some extent.

At this point, you should start looking at your online presence as one of your most vital business assets. The best thing about your online efforts is that you can continue using them even after COVID-19 becomes a thing of the past.

Review your online presence and make a list of the things you are using. Identify the gaps and list out the processes which are not supported by your digitization efforts.

The information will empower you to pinpoint the tools you can use to facilitate customer retention and ensure revenue growth.

While the COVID-19 business disruption motivates you to do it today, you should be aware that you will still be able to use the newly implemented solutions even during normal times. The process will enable you to sustain business growth and capitalize on the new market opportunities.

The lockdown has encouraged businesses to change their behaviours. Some were forced to promote working from home, which led to the increased use of tools such as Zoom.

Reinventing business in real-time is challenging as data may not be as accurate, as customer behaviours are likely not similar to how they were during normal times.

Since you managed to run a business during the lockdown, it is time to tap into that valuable experience.

What aspect of business management was suffering the most? Whether it’s communication, management, execution, or collaboration. Conduct a thorough review of your business operation and look for ways to improve it.

Reinventing your business from the ground up while basing it on the digital transformation can help you future proof your survival and stay ahead of the competition. This goes beyond identifying which process to digitize.

You will also have to pinpoint viable software solutions, ensure a smooth onboarding process, and come up with new policies to minimize cybersecurity risks and unlock the full potential of newly implemented solutions.

As previously mentioned, many companies had to pivot to other businesses entirely to cushion the blow of the pandemic. These were not shots fired in the dark, but decisions based on data.

If you take a closer look at the markets, you can see one trend that they all had in common.

According to a research conducted by Accenture, the huge shift to ecommerce is likely to continue and the expected future increase ecommerce purchases from new or low frequency users is an astonishing 160%.

COVID-19 is not the only factor driving the digital transformation, and you should be aware of it.

The markets around the globe are changing as consumers become more aware of the novel virus implications and adapting to new behaviours. You can learn a lot from looking at these trends.

The digital transformation of internal processes is only one part of getting ready for a potential COVID-19 second wave. The new market trends can help you optimize your offer and fine-tune your digital marketing efforts.

If you were planning a move towards pivoting your business as well, this information could come quite handy. You can identify new revenue opportunities and leverage digital transformation to enable your business to pursue them.

Read our blog post to learn about how to digitally grow your business.

 Pursue Digital Growth Opportunities While Mitigating Risks

When it comes to answering the question of how to grow your business during COVID-19, the answer lies in finding and pursuing digital growth opportunities.

Digitization of internal and external business processes can enable you to scale up your business, help you penetrate new markets, and establish a better market position.

While you can digitally excel in various areas, ranging from your company blog and online customer service to social media presence and paid ads, you have to take into account risks as well.

Incorporating online marketing and cloud-based services in your day to day operations exposes your business to new risks.

While pursuing opportunities for expanding your reach, you should update your risk management strategy and have a contingency plan for all major scenarios.

Growing your company’s online presence is not difficult, as you can see in our article “13 Steps to Creating a Comprehensive Content Marketing Strategy”. The article spoke specifically about content marketing strategy, which in our opinion should be the center of any well-thought-of digital marketing strategy.

It is important to have your business prepare for a potential second wave of COVID-19. If you are interested in more detailed information on how to develop a winning online strategy, download our free guidebook “The Ultimate Digital Marketing Playbook” for a comprehensive guide on how this can be done.

Was the information on this article useful? How was your experience with digital transformation during Covid-19? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Other Related Blog Posts:

• 7 Steps on How to Digitally Grow Your Financial Advisory Business
• 13 Steps To Creating A Comprehensive Content Marketing Strategy