As we enter the second half of the year, investors are preparing for mixed results at best. While a V-shaped recovery is not likely, there are still things entrepreneurs can do to make 2020 a success.
Here are seven ways startups can navigate the end of 2020.
Prioritize ethical marketing and eliminate ethical debt.
Your business is more likely to grow through the pandemic when your marketing efforts are focused on doing the right thing by customers. Focusing your marketing efforts on doing good by your customer is not new. Yet as technology advances and pressure to drive sales increases, there’s a temptation to misrepresent what technologies can do, or misuse technologies to identify prospects or acquire customers.
Questionable claims and behaviors tarnish a company’s reputation and lead to ethical debt, something that’s nearly impossible to pay off. As a technology community, we have to uphold our businesses and industry to higher standards, especially now.
Get control over your customer data.
Now that companies have moved all their interactions to digital, with email being the primary channel for reaching customers, companies have to be diligent about how their customer data is collected and managed.
When it comes to collecting, if you’re acquiring prospects by adding tags to a page, tracking website visitors or purchasing a list, your campaigns aren’t going to lead to sales. Instead, they’ll get ignored, blocked, reported and/or fined. With businesses tightening the belt, any behavior to attract and acquire new customers that’s not above board puts the company at risk.
For managing customer data, accept it’s a continuous effort to ensure data is accurate and clean. The difference now is there’s no margin of error. Companies need to be able to trust their customer data is correct and acquired ethically.
Focus on helping customers grow.
Shift your focus to identifying and addressing your customers’ needs. In today’s market, what customers need to not only survive but to succeed has changed; the old approaches to reaching customers just don’t work. Figure out what will help them run their businesses and make it easy for them to get it from you. It’s simple—you’ll grow your business by assisting customers in the growth of theirs.
If your company doesn’t do one of these three things, pivot your business to be 100 percent digital.
The most vibrant companies today appear to be on one of three paths. The first is technology that supports working from home. The second is creating technology that allows others to be entertained at home. And the third is providing a product or service directly pandemic-related.
This doesn’t mean that if you don’t fall into one of those categories you can’t succeed. What it does mean, however, is that if your business falls outside those segments, you need to transform into being 100 percent digital. For many, this entails reinterpreting their business or adjusting their model to reflect a digital only world. Even after there’s a vaccine and we’re able to resume our pre-Covid-19 activities, we will see pandemic-driven processes and business ideas become part of the new normal. For businesses that are flexible and innovative in their shift to becoming digitally driven today, there will be tremendous opportunities.
Don’t assume headlines about VC funding and private equity mean money is flowing.
What’s happening now is a reset and redirect of investments into businesses either directly or closely related to the pandemic and its impact on the way we work and live.
Rebalance your budget into digital.
When it comes to planning for the rest of the year and into 2021, shift your budget into digital and hold off hiring until your pipeline is full—especially in sales.
Don’t be in a rush to declare when everybody will go back to the office.
For many businesses requiring employees be onsite, communicating a detailed strategy and staggered schedules is critical. Yet there are many other businesses choosing to wait. Having a structured approach and regularly communicating your businesses’ status is key.
Now is the time to get things right. Reprioritize if you have to and set yourself up to weather a long road to recovery. That doesn’t mean you can’t grow. In fact, companies putting the right processes in place now are more likely to come out of this on top.
Mark Briggs is the CEO of Validity, a data management software company headquartered in Boston.
