7 June 2021

Kickstart your post-pandemic business recovery with Seek Social

Our fingers are crossed as we write this, but as the weather warms up and the UK’s vaccine rollout continues apace, it finally feels like we’re on the path to leave the pandemic behind – starting with step four of the recovery roadmap on June 21.

That step will see the country as a whole finally free of all lockdown restrictions, but even if it is the end of the Coronavirus pandemic in this country, in its wake COVID-19 will still leave many in need of business recovery support in the post-pandemic world.

Nowhere is this more true than here in the North West, where the presence and prevalence of Variants of Concern have seen parts of the region subject to harsher lockdown restrictions, and extra time under ‘local lockdown’ – time that businesses in other areas have not had to endure.

The council here In Bury recognises that the town’s local businesses have had it tougher than many other parts of the country over the past eighteen months, and have put in place the ‘Bury Means Business Recovery Expertise Fund’ to help local businesses get back on their feet after COVID-19.

Bury Means Business have also named a group of Recovery Experts – local businesses with the skills and knowledge to help other companies and entrepreneurs make a success of their business recovery. Seek Social are incredibly proud to say that we’ve been named as one of these Recovery Experts, so in today’s blog we’ll be showing you how the Bury Means Business Recovery Expertise Fund, and the skills of the Seek Social team can be used to help your business bounce back following the pandemic. Are you ready? Then lets get started!

 

What is the Bury Means Business Recovery Expertise Fund?

This fund was created in response to the adverse business conditions brought about by the Coronavirus pandemic. It is designed to help small & medium size enterprises (SME’s) access specialist support and expertise which can help them recover from (and become more resilient to) the effects of lockdown and highly restricted trading – as was seen in 2020 and the first half of 2021.

Further details regarding the fund, including more information regarding who can apply, the types of support available, and contact details for each of the Recovery Experts can be found here.

 

How Can Seek Social help your post-pandemic business recovery?

In the thick of the pandemic, most businesses were effectively forced to move to an online-only service, as lockdown restrictions both forced their brick-and-mortar stores to close for an extended period of time, and prevented many customers from shopping offline at the same time. Now that the majority of the buying public have had a taste of the convenience that shopping online offers, they aren’t going to forget it – and so creating, establishing and marketing your business via an online presence needs to be part of your post-pandemic business recovery plan.

Thankfully, that’s the Seek Social team’s specialty. If you want to market your business and sell your products and services online, we can help you do it. If you already know how you want to use online marketing in your business recovery, we can help you put that strategy into place and make it operate at peak efficiency. If you don’t, we can also devise a strategy that will work for you before putting it into practice for you.

Your bespoke online business recovery strategy from Seek Social would include a mix of the various different services that we provide. Every business is different, so exactly what a plan for your business would entail we can’t tell you here – but what we can say with confidence is that all of the individual services involved would work together, to promote your business and sell your products and services online.

As we’ve mentioned above, Seek Social offer a range of different digital marketing services. Each one of those services can help businesses in a different way, with a different area of their online marketing. To make it easy to understand the support we can provide, the support your business needs, and the kind of results that you can expect to see from a Seek Social business recovery plan we’ve listed each of our services below – as well as what each one does, and how it benefits business. Take a look!

 

How Each of our services can help your business recover:

SEO
‘SEO’ means ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. This is the art of making a website more appealing to search engines, so that they want to place it higher in their search rankings. A better ranking is proven to help business in many ways, but the main ones are that it earns you more web traffic, and more exposure in general. If you have a website but you need more traffic, more customers or more leads, SEO could be a key part of your business recovery plan.

PPC / Paid Ads
‘PPC’ stands for ‘Pay Per Click’ – a type of ad seen on search engines. You do need to pay for these ads, but you only pay if someone actually clicks the ad – so if you’re working on a tight budget, or only want to market in certain geographical areas, PPC ads could be an effective business recovery solution for you.

Web Design & Development
If you’re completely new to the world of online marketing, you’ll most likely need a new website. The web design and web development experts at Seek Social can handle all of this for you. We’re always here to advise – but you tell us what you want, and as long as it’s actually possible, we’ll make it happen. (…and if it isn’t we’ll tell you – in plain English too.)

The quality of your site really can make or break an online-focused business recovery strategy, as it becomes not only your online shop front, but an actual point of sale and a central hub for your marketing, your brand, and your message too. Everything needs to work smoothly, instinctively, and pull together in the same direction. You need experts in charge of its construction to make sure that happens, and in Bury, that means Seek Social!

Content Marketing
Any written content that sells your business, your products or services online falls under the umbrella of ‘content marketing’. It could be a blog, the copy on your website, a social media post – anything really – and given that the words you use are also a big factor in determining how well your website ranks on search engines, having access to good-quality content marketing professionals like us suddenly becomes doubly important to your post-Corona business recovery…

Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing is the art of selling your business or services on the various social media platforms out there. Doing this successfully requires a good knowledge of the various social media platforms out there, who uses them (and when), and the various individual foibles of each one.

In the post-pandemic world Social Media is the world’s new high street, so most businesses will NEED a successful social media presence to make their business recovery plans a success – and that’s why you need Seek Social on your side. We’ve made it our business to know everything there is to know about marketing on social media, and we put that knowledge into practice to bring success for our clients via a range of tried, tested, and proven social media marketing strategies.

Online Engagement
Just as you would interact with the customers in your shop, you need to interact with them on social media too – and this process is called ‘Online Engagement’. It involves reacting and responding to comments on social media posts, posts by others that you’re tagged into etc., and generally sparking and maintaining conversations, raising awareness and a ‘buzz’ about your brand.

The quality of your engagement really can make or break your business recovery and your overall online presence, since it also includes an element of communication, customer service and brand preservation – so you really can’t afford to get this one wrong, and we can help make sure that doesn’t happen…

Email Marketing
It’s been around for years, but make no mistake – when done right, email marketing is definitely still a valuable online marketing tool that can help your business recovery post-COVID. What’s more, Seek Social have all the expertise you need to make the most of this tool, and create eye-catching marketing emails that generate sales, not spam.

Branding Support
Your brand is the soul of your business, so for everything from marketing material to your overall business recovery plan to be successful, that brand needs to be defined, nurtured and maintained well.

Get this right, and you market to people that will buy your products or services in a way that will appeal to them, driving both traffic and sales in the process. Get it wrong, and you almost certainly won’t – so if you’re going into business for the first time, or you’d like to make a fresh start after lockdown – we’re ready willing and able to help you!

Graphic Design
Your brain makes sense of what It sees before anything else, and that makes the visual elements of your business – your logos, colours, fonts etc. as well as the other imagery that you use on your site or with your social posts (Pro tip: no post should be without an image) very important. Our designers can create bespoke artwork for use on any platform, that will also fall in line with your branding and message – helping get eyes on your business, and thereby help your business recovery plans succeed.