Coronavirus Survival Guide for Businesses
Have you noticed a decrease in business enquiries and sales?
If you haven’t, then it’s highly likely that you soon will.
Coronavirus is the biggest threat to businesses worldwide … and our data proves it.
More about that further down.
And there’s data from other sources that also proves it. See, for example, the section titled ‘Organic traffic is down in most industries’ within https://neilpatel.com/blog/coronavirus/, which includes this chart showing organic website traffic declines in most sectors …
Many businesses will die or decline too much to ever recover, while others will survive.
What makes the difference is taking proactive action to be one of the survivors.
That may sound dramatic but the threat is very real.
The good news is that we include survival tactics later on in this guide, but before that, please continue reading, as it’s very much worth understanding the current position in more detail …
Why our data and viewpoint is relevant
A1WebStats is a product that has been tracking millions of visitors to thousands of business websites worldwide since 2012.
When taken collectively, our data shows a pattern of increases and decreases of website visitors (to the websites we track).
This graph takes the millions of visitors to websites that we track and presents them over recent time, using a scale of 0-100, where 100 represents levels of website traffic before Coronavirus became big news …
Each date on that graph represents a significant event relating to Coronavirus.
The most significant part of that graph is what’s happened to Italian website visitors and what that means to businesses worldwide.
Lessons from Italy
From late January onwards, there has been a huge decrease in numbers of website visitors going to the websites of Italy-based businesses.
Those decreases have dipped in line with significant events such as:
- The first Coronvirus death in Italy.
- Quarantine of Italian regions, followed by the whole country.
- Other significant events (such as the closing of shops and businesses).
Our data shows that from the end of January through to mid March, there was a 54% decrease in the number of visitors going to Italian business websites.
Our dialogue with some of those businesses reinforced the data, with many saying how much their levels of enquiries and sales had dropped as a result of Coronavirus.
This is no surprise because although business has to go on, the economic impact of Coronavirus naturally means that buyers will be holding back until they feel they are able to spend.
It becomes a domino effect of:
- Business A has less sales.
- Business A knows they want Product X but won’t research the options until they have more financial stability.
- Business B offers Product X but isn’t getting the sales they need.
- Business B wants Product Y but without their own sales coming in, they’re not in a position to research and buy.
That scenario above becomes a problem when businesses effectively slow down researching and buying.
In short: businesses are then fighting for a smaller pool of potential buyers who have been to their websites.
We need to return to the graph …
What else does the graph show us?
Italy has taken a brave decision to quarantine the whole country, in a bid to restrict the spread of Coronavirus.
Short-term (but likely longer-term), that will have a huge economic impact to the majority of business sectors.
Although we have website visitors data from all types of businesses worldwide, the majority of our data is from Europe (including the UK) and the US.
The graph has a separate (grey) line showing the decreases in website visitors just within the UK and US.
That decline is not as dramatic as Italy, showing that website visitor numbers are down 21% as at mid-March 2020).
But you can see the decrease is still there, as events around the world (particularly Italy at the time of writing) send shockwaves through businesses.
Those businesses may be directly affected by the economic fallout of the position in Italy, but are equally likely to be concerned about their own position, should stronger containment measures be introduced in their own countries.
To summarise that: there will be decreases in visitors to websites, in line with countries having to adapt their stance on Coronavirus-related restrictions.
What’s highly likely to happen
As Italy has shown us, the bigger the impact of Coronavirus, the less potential customers there will be for businesses in the majority of industries.
Banging the same old drum but with a Coronavirus focus
Here at A1WebStats we have been banging a particular drum for many years.
That drum beats to the sound of:
If you make your website better, and your marketing spend more efficient, then you will gain more enquiries and sales from your website, and your competitors will lose those potential customers.
The message often doesn’t get acted upon because of a variety of reasons including:
- The business feels they’re doing OK
- The business has staff/external resources that are not doing a good enough job of making their online presence as strong as it needs to be.
- The business doesn’t want to make the time for making things better and prefers to throw more marketing budget at the problem of not getting enough sales.
Coronavirus WILL mean that businesses have to work a lot harder to get enquiries and sales from potential customers.
Each business will get less visitors to their website, which means they have to convert (to enquiries/sales) more of the visitors that they do get.
Each visitor that looks at a product or service page, but doesn’t make contact, is potentially someone who will find what they want on a competitors’ website.
That’s where we can help.
That help is in a very different context to how we’ve previously offered it, because historically, ‘getting your website and marketing right’ was something businesses paid lip service to.
Now it’s going to become critical for the survival of many businesses.
How we can help – at zero cost to you
We don’t want to go into great depth here about how A1WebStats can help you gain more enquiries and sales from the website visitors and marketing you currently have. You can click here to find out more about the specific functionality of how our system helps.
Here we’re focusing on the key question that really should be in your mind, unless you really are convinced that your business is Coronavirus-immune …
What can I do right now that will help me to get more enquiries/sales from my website visitors, knowing that those visitors are going to be lower because there will be less people searching for what our business offers?
The answer is this:
- Sign up for a free 30 day trial of A1WebStats.
- Install our tracking code on your website (it’s easy – we provide instructions).
- Wait for enough data to have collected (typically 200+ visitors is enough).
- Have a free screenshare call with us (we’ll let you know when the time is right), focused on what your data (and our expertise) is saying about where you are losing opportunities from your website visitors.
- Then use our recommendations to go and fix what needs to be fixed. This will usually be a part of your website or marketing that is losing you the most opportunities.
- Feel happy that your website will be stronger and gain more enquiries from what is clearly going to be a smaller pool of visitors going to your website.
What’s in it for A1WebStats?
You may wonder why we give you:
- 30 days of our software.
- A free consultancy call that will explain where your website/marketing needs to improve.
It’s simple:
- We like helping businesses that actually want to succeed.
- Some of our 30 day free triallers decide to keep our software and the ability to ask for our input from time to time.
In fact, our numbers show that nearly a third of our free triallers continue using A1WebStats afterwards, so it’s worth it from a commercial perspective as well (not that we charge a lot for what we offer anyway, as you can see here).
Coronavirus could be the best thing to happen to your business
When business is going OK, most people don’t really think about applying more focus to squeezing more results out of their website visitors.
Actually, most businesses have no idea how much potential business they’re losing (and yes, it’s very easy for us to prove how much business is being lost, which is a key output from the free trial).
Coronavirus turns ‘website conversions’ into a necessity instead of a ‘must look at that one day’.
When the concept of ‘getting more results from website visitors’ becomes ingrained in a business, that business will prosper.
So from that perspective, you could see Coronavirus as enabling a positive to come out of a negative – that ultimately makes your business stronger.
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