To combat the economic impact of COVID-19, The Hong Kong Government’s new Distance Business (D-Biz) Programme aims to support smaller businesses to transform their I.T. infrastructure, making it easier to conduct business and attract customers where social distancing measures are in place.
But where to start? Start by considering how you might first transform your business proposition to stay relevant and competitive. Assess how concerns around health and safety, and the need for social distancing, present both barriers and opportunities that didn’t exist before.
Keep reading to be inspired by the new growth opportunities in your industry, and the digital solutions you might consider to enable this.
- HOW TO GROW ONLINE SALES OF YOUR PRODUCTS.
Consider for businesses where a physical product is to be exchanged.
Adapt your Offer:
Communicate how your current products (or develop new products) meet new needs arising from concern around pandemics, spread of disease and increased social distancing behaviour.
- Maintaining health and safety: immunity boosting foods and ingredients, personal and home hygiene products.
- Working remotely: office and stationery items.
- Schooling and entertaining kids at home: kid and family friendly activities.
- Isolating at home: hobby/interest and fitness equipment, easy meal solutions, home beauty care.
When there are less opportunities to impress with fashion on the streets in the office, fashion brands are staying relevant by designing face masks.
Adapt your Digital Solution:
Transfer your business away from physical stores to online stores, and enable a seamless online buyer journey: from finding your brand, to finding their product, to placing an order, and collecting or having it delivered – without any physical contact with others.
- Add E-Commerce functionality to your own website, but consider what logistics (ie. delivery) method you can support.
- Partner with smart kiosk, vending or locker providers for easy and contactless customer collection.
- List your products on 3rd Party E-Commerce platforms (Tmall, Taobao, Amazon) which attract audiences already shopping for your product category, as well as provide their own logistics solution, and bundle products for more cost efficient delivery for the customer.
- Implement a Customer Relations Management (CRM) System to automate and improve your customer engagement, and applications such as ChatBots to help manage online queries at any hour.
- HOW TO GROW ONLINE SALES FOR YOUR RESTAURANT OR CAFE.
Restaurant and cafe businesses are heavily impacted by social distancing measures, and even when these are relaxed, it may be some time before people regain the confidence to eat out as often as they once did, and furthermore, social disruption is always a possibility!
Adapt your offer:
Consider how you can make online ordering, contactless collection or delivery and consistency of high quality food and experience a feature of your business.
- Limiting your delivery menu to the items you know will still look and taste good after the journey home!
- Create a special menu of items that can be finished at home for maximum freshness, like dumplings ready to be steamed to finish.
- Add family size meals to your menu, like a lasagne, that can be enjoyed together and recreate a home cooked meal.
- Offer pantry staples, meal kits and frozen meals that can be ordered at the same time and enjoyed later.
- Maintain engagement with your customers by offering online cooking classes, sharing recipes and celebrating seasons and events with relevant meals.
Restaurants are increasing usage options to meet more in-home needs, including the options of having fresh for now, and raw or frozen to cook later.
Adapt your digital solution:
- Add E-Commerce functionality to your own website – and even more importantly provide a mobile app solution!
- Create an orderly pickup point or even drive-through, if possible. For delivery, offer contactless doorstep drop-off.
- List your business on 3rd Party Delivery platforms (Uber, Deliveroo) which attract audiences already shopping for meal delivery, as well as provide an existing logistics solution.
- Implement a Customer Relations Management (CRM) System to automate and improve your customer engagement, and applications such as ChatBots to help manage online queries at any hour.
- HOW TO TRANSFORM YOUR SERVICE BUSINESS ONLINE
Consider for businesses providing a service usually facilitated at a central location, often in a group setting, such as education or training, fitness, or consulting practices such as finance, legal and accounting.
Adapt your offer:
Consider how you might be able to make your service, functional and enjoyable to an audience at home.
- Automating client communication and information storage.
- Maintaining the quality of your service through pre-recorded or live video conferences and streams.
- Implementing live Q&A and virtual discussion boards.
- Ensuring content is functional for in-home/remote use.
- Making content as engaging as it can be when consumed in isolation.
Once people experience the convenience of having usually out-of-home services brought in-home, will they want to depart from it?
Adapt your digital solution:
- Develop an in-bound digital marketing strategy, showcasing your service and having customers come to you.
- Extend the functionality of your website or develop an opp, depending on how users will be consuming your service.
- Create your online content, from written forms to video guides.
- Implement a Customer Relations Management (CRM) System to automate and improve your customer engagement, and applications such as ChatBots to help manage online queries at any hour.
- In the case you are holding sensitive customer data, implementing the highest level of cybersecurity is also critical.
How Kindred can help:
- Partner with you to identify your digital goals and needs, and develop a digital strategy suitable to your budget.
- Our team leads the design and build of new websites, or can optimise your current website for customer experience (UI and UX design) and conversion with the addition of order and payment (E-Commerce) functionality.
- 3rd Party E-Commerce Platform setup for your business and products. In both cases, we ensure the onsite content and technical content is optimised to give you maximum visibility in search (SEO), seperate to additional visibility boost that can be achieved through paid advertising and incentives.
- Accelerate your business growth through paid media (PPC, SEM, Programmatic, Social Ads) and advise you the best strategy based on goals and budget.
- Content creation, including video and photography, copywriting and translation by our own multi-lingual team (English, Traditional & Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Indonesian)
- Identify & implement a CRM platform and programme suited to your business.
Learn more and contact kindred here.
