7-minute read
With the coronavirus outbreak fully underway, business operations have been interrupted all over the country. This has left a lot of companies stranded when it comes to their web development and maintenance needs.
If your company is one that is currently experiencing a lack of website development, then you have likely not been able to do everything that you should be doing to keep your customers or client base properly updated.
During these uncertain times, proper communication is everything. It is strongly recommended that every business take the time to sit down and create or regularly update their emergency communications plan. Without one in place, they will quickly find themselves ill-equipped to handle any significant disaster interrupting their normal business operations. While COVID-19 might not be what someone would think of as a traditional type of disaster, it is still very much a disaster and needs to be responded to in the same way as any other disaster would be.
Why a Website is so Important Right Now
In addition to the outreach that many businesses have been recently doing in the form of email campaigns, one of the most efficient tools at a company’s disposal amidst this COVID-19 outbreak is their official website.
The difference between using this as a communication platform as opposed to something like an email or social media campaign is that anyone who visits your website is going to be actively interested in learning more about how the coronavirus pandemic has affected your business operations. Whereas, someone receiving an email from your company or seeing a post on social media may not have been interested in knowing how your company is approaching them. Because of this unwanted outreach, a lot of customers have been unsubscribing from online communications from various businesses.
Therefore, you should be taking this opportunity to lean into your website as your primary form of updating your customers or clients on how COVID-19 is impacting your business. But as previously mentioned, having to rely on your team working from home is likely putting a strain on your ability to keep your website regularly updated or might make you completely unable to create any new pages or sections covering coronavirus updates.
That is why you need to rely on a team of web development and SEO experts like ourselves to turn your website into an excellent information hub to keep your customer base properly updated. In order to accomplish this, here are a few pages or sections that you will definitely need to create or update on your website during this COVID-19 outbreak.
Weekly or Monthly Blog Posts
Blog posts are a fantastic tool for keeping your customer base updated on any new developments in your company. And although you should ideally have a company blog for many other reasons, this is definitely one of the biggest reasons to churn out at least one or two articles every month.
During this pandemic, one of those regular articles should be a post updating your visitors about what is happening at the company in order to try and deal with COVID-19. In fact, you might want to even use this pandemic as an excuse to jumpstart your company blog if you still don’t have one. This blog post should contain detailed information on what your continuity plan is for handling this outbreak so that your customers know exactly how it will affect the products or services they get from your business.
A common mistake that many businesses will make is that they only make one blog post at the very beginning of the disaster and then go silent for the next couple of months. Doing this leaves your customers or clients wondering what exactly is going on at your company and if any progress has been made in getting your operations completely back to normal. The best approach to take is to make a new blog post or update the original blog post at least once a month but preferably even more often.
If done properly, a blog post should not leave customers with any questions regarding how your business is operating during this pandemic. If they do still have some questions, then this next section is particularly useful.
FAQ Page
This is another website element that every business should already have. Having a frequently asked questions page on your website allows you to better explain any information that is ambiguous or unanswered in your sales copy. It is also a good place to put the answers to some of the most common questions that your company receives so that you can cut down on the amount of time spent answering the same question over email or on the phone over and over again.
But when it comes to a pandemic like COVID-19, having a properly developed FAQ page is especially important. This is because you can create an entirely new section of your FAQ page that contains several questions specifically dedicated to coronavirus-related questions. So instead of having to try and scan through a lengthy article or email, someone can simply go to your FAQ page and look for their specific question within your list of commonly asked questions regarding your company’s approach to handling COVID-19.
Banner Notifications
This should be by no means your only effort towards updating your customers about your company’s operations during this coronavirus outbreak but using a banner message on your website can be a great supplemental resource.
This is because it is able to appear on every webpage, which means that it is impossible to miss and can link directly to your blog post or FAQ page to help make finding the relevant information as easy as possible. To help avoid overwhelming the visitors and just causing them to close the banner message, you want to make sure that you create something short and sweet that tells them to click on the banner in order to receive on how your company is changing in this midst of this pandemic.
Once you make sure to include all of these various elements on your company website, it will help to maintain the level of confidence that your customers or clients have in your business.
