Small Biz Has Truly Learned From This Pandemic: Buy or Sell?
Many digital marketers are saying they are as busy as ever if not more due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The general storyline is that so many businesses had to pivot to online services or at the very least make sure that their messaging was effective and up to date in a very fluid and unprecedented situation. They don’t want to be caught off guard again in the future and small biz in general has surely learned a big and valuable lesson. Right?
What I saw
Personally I witnessed this - no doubt. My clients had some serious adapting to do as announcements from state level government had major impacts on their business that were indeed time sensitive. This kept me plenty busy from my “home headquarters”. I even gained a new account right in the middle of lockdown - a startup who gets it and used an online presence as a jumping off point. Be sure to give Dr. Aaron Studwell’s ExoConsulting a visit and follow starting with his website www.exoconsulting.net - very cool content and consulting services that you will certainly enjoy if you’re into space, science and science fiction, but I digress (only slightly). Some small businesses had to close down temporarily (if not indefinitely), some had to move to curbside or limited operations, some had to emphasize their online services that they could still offer, and some who had very little or no online presence found themselves woefully unprepared and scrambling.
How we were impacted
Our photography studio Frameable Faces was physically closed and we weren’t able to take any photos of clients for months. Granted we have a really nice online presence and we offer some services that we can provide online like photo restoration but our core business was completely paused. We have diversified over the last couple of years which helped - me with M10 Social and Ally with a Plexus side hustle she’s been building for a few years, so that helped us, but there are still many who have all their eggs in one basket and never really understood the need for social media.
So what’s next?
For those businesses that were able to nimbly pivot to online offerings that they weren’t used to providing, kudos to them! I am really impressed with much of what I have seen. For these brands if they didn’t have a social media presence and/or email list you would hope they learned the lesson of how important these things are. But…..and certainly this could be a much broader question, if and when things go back to normal will they keep it up? Or will human nature mean that they will gradually forget about it? Will they drift back into their old ways? Will the ones who did learn the lesson continue with content and building a community going forward?
Are you buying or selling the “small-businesses-DID-learn” stock? It’s mainly a rhetorical question for now. I guess we’ll see how it plays out…
M10 Social is owned by Doug Cohen in West Bloomfield, MI and provides social media training and digital marketing services from the Frameable Faces Photography studio Doug owns with his wife Ally. He can be reached there at tel:248-790-7317, by mobile at tel:248-346-4121 or via email at mailto:doug@frameablefaces.com.
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