Firstly, may I wish you all the best of health and hope that you, your colleagues and your family are well. This is not an easy time for any of us, and we know that all of you will be adjusting to a different way of living and working. As a Small business ourselves, we understand the problems and issues you may be facing over the next few weeks and months.
Your customers may not be able to visit you face to face, but you can still communicate and operate your business successfully.
We want to show you how you can use this crisis as an opportunity to continue to run your business, to change it, and to create new opportunities through various online tools and digitally engage with your audience. Hopefully helping you through the next few weeks and months, but also offering more dependable digital services in the future.
Communication with customers and colleagues.
Keep Talking - Face to face communication can easily be replaced with digital media. A smartphone, tablet or, laptop with a camera are enough to get started.
Using messenger services such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or SMS, you can stay in touch with customers and colleagues quickly & easily.
Video Calls - There are lots of great tools available for video conferencing and remote maintenance or screen sharing.
We've used Skype & Teamviewer for several years and always found these to work well.
However, other options can be found here and in most cases can be used free of charge or for a small flat fee for extra features.
Tip - When using video conferencing tools try to use a headset or headphones with mic, to reduce feedback and echo.
These tools include:
- Zoom
- Meet from Google
- Skype
- Teamviewer
- Microsoft Teams
- Facetime - If everyone's using Apple devices and possibly best for your personal/family catch-ups
- House Party - Great fun for your personal/family catch-ups
We've used Zoom, Skype, Facetime, Houseparty within the last few days for business calls, group meeting and office catch-ups.
As well as a business call, you can use these tools to chat with friends and colleagues, networking and having a virtual coffee/tea break.
Telephone Calls can be diverted to home landlines or mobile phones quickly and easily using services from TTNC or Circle Loop.
We use both TTNC or Circle Loop to supply our geographical & 0800 phone number and know first hand, how valuable and easy to use these services are.
- TTNC- Supply Geographical, 0800 numbers and provide a really nice user interface to redirect landlines into there system, allowing them to redirect calls, use hunt group, answer calls on your behalf and lots more
- Circle Loop - Provide VoIP Geographical numbers, that redirect to your mobile via an app. Really easy to use, and simple affordable pricing.
We can help you with any methods of communication and can also provide advice and training on how best to use these.
Identify new business opportunities - Offer Online courses or sell online.
Online Courses - Learning Platforms
In many business industries in the UK, it's possible to consider providing online courses using learning platforms.
For Joomla! CMS websites several different solutions can be integrated into your website.
- Shika - Is a useful extension, however, is quite expensive at £699
- Guru - This is another useful extension which we have used in the past for other clients. They offer a free version which is very basic. The full paid, pro version is £299.
- OSCampus - A great extension and is an excellent price of £69. A better price if this is a new idea or gamble for your business.
All 3 of these extensions give you updates and support with the developer for 12 months
If you have a business that could offer online learning or video information, one of these Joomla extensions could be a great way to create new business, and we can help get you set up.
Record and present videos
Maybe you would like to showcase and work with video content. Platforms such as Vimeo and Youtube are perfect. You can then offer these videos to your customers free or for a fee.
A quick, easy way to achieve this is to create private or password-protected videos and share the links after a PayPal or BACS payment has been made.
If you have a Joomla website, we can also help host your videos on your website and make these available to your customers and users free of charge or again for a fee.
E-Commerce - Online Web Shops
For many years we've helped many clients with creating, managing, maintaining E-Commerce Webshops and also helped these become successful, through our input/ideas and digital engagement.
If you have a business that sells a physical or digital product (such as learning, videos, software), then you could consider adding the ability to sell from your website. Selling via your website is quick, easy, secure and available to your customers 24/7.
Another idea could be to sell gift vouchers for your business or services.
The significant advantage of this current crisis is that not only are you working from home, but there are many other people are also working from home, with more time than usual. So there are a large number of potential customers that you can reach with online courses, videos, webshops and initial offers.
Optimise your website and online presence
We believe that NOW is the time to make sure website content is up to date, your images are fresh, social media posts are new & relevant, optimise the look of your social media channels and catch up on any training for your business and for personal growth.
We can work together with you to add new content to your website, tweak the content that's already in place, optimise and refresh images, create social media graphics, assist with social media posting and general advice on how to engage with your audience digitally.
As well as refreshing content and digital engagement, we can also Skype/Zoom call and offer advice on best practices or any training we can help you with.
Have you been thinking of having your website redesigned or improved with any of the following additions?
Please get in touch and start a conversation with us about how we can help.
- E-Commerce Online shop - Seeling online to your customers 24/7
- Events Advertising, Calendar & Booking system - Allows you to showcase events and sell tickets to events, courses, tours, etc
- Appointment Booking system - Online availability calendar and booking system.
- Membership System - allowing users to register free or paid. Excellent addition to restricting parts of your website to paid members only.
- Online Chat Forum or Social - JomSocial, EasySocial & Community Builder are all great in Joomla
- Document manager & Document Seller - Allow free access to articles/documents or restrict to paid members.
- Helpdesk & Support System - Offer a Knowledgebase type system for your customers and/or ticket support.
