Recently, the pandemic has been a surprise and severe knockout to all businesses, even no exception to giants in the business world. People rush to find Covid 19 business relief plans.
We know that small and medium enterprises are going through ten thousands time more difficulties than ever. How life fastly changes is crazy too.
Not long ago, these businesses are the potentials of development, being a new breeze to industries. Business owners were setting goals for a booming year. The first months of the new year are expected to see sales records.
A brand should have been shown out to the marketplace. Within a snap of a finger, all expectations are set aside because the business world is being shuffled and none of us can be sure to keep fighting.
No matter what happens, it is not easy to give up. Without knowing how many articles you have read through, we, as other dedicated writers, promise to give you the best of us.
In this post, we want to give you COVID 19 business relief plans – the best solutions we have researched and hope that they are helpful to your business in the long run.
In addition, here we provide you relief resources and campaigns to maintain cash flow and reduce your expenses.
Social distancing protocols are being encouraged or enforced around the world. While these are important measures for managing the COVID-19 pandemic, retail stores and restaurants are facing unprecedented challenges as a result.
Table of Contents
COVID 19 business relief plans
Capital resources
As everyone is grappling the difficulties, it’s a hardship for businesses to have stable capital access for maintenance. Especially when many businesses are having debts or credits, making little profits during this time makes the situation worse. They cannot stand there watching losses going on. As for entrepreneurs who just start their business, they are the most in need.
There are a few recommendations for you.
1. Paycheck Protection Program
It is a section of the CAREs Act that sets aside 350 billion dollars to support small businesses. They offer capital access by connecting them with other more than 800 lenders across the U.S. They don’t lend money directly to those in need but giving guidelines to get loans from these lenders, community development organizations, and micro-lending institutions.
The benefit is that the purpose covers most of the business needs, ranging from operation to long-term fixed assets. You can receive at least 500$ dollars and more. It also depends on your purpose, income source, and even the company’s location.
To guarantee, businesses have to inform SBA-approved lender of what you use your money for. However, it is not a big deal because sometimes when the reason is persuasive, it is easier for you to get the amount of money you want.
Another benefit is that in some special cases, your business stands a chance of not having to pay the loan back. Because they are converted to grants.
2. Citi
To support COVID 19 business relief plans of businesses, Citi offers some assistance. As for minimum payment in credit cards, they offer a waiver for 2 statement cycles. As for small businesses, they extend fee waivers on monthly service fees and remote deposit capture fees until May 8, 2020.
3. American Express
As an application of Financial Hardship program, they offer waivers of late fees on business card holders and also provide access to funds through their American Express Working Capital.
Ecommerce
1. Gift cards
Gift cards have always benefited any companies since they are a big business. Undoubtedly, during holiday seasons, they are in specially high demand and this pandemic period is a so-called “holiday” because of the need for shopping incentives.
As the economy has been down for a while and many people temporarily lose their jobs, demands for shopping other than necessities are cut down as much as possible.
To incentivize your customers, gift cards should be a good idea as for this Covid 19 business relief plan. Gift cards provide you an immediate source of profit and it satisfies customers as well because they would prefer to have these discounts. In most cases, gift cards also ensure that a customer will return to business in the future.
To further support this, you can also collaborate with complementary local businesses to have more customer approach. Besides, these online gift cards are very suitable when human interactions are avoided at best. Take good care of social media and email marketing campaigns to gain the efficiency.
2. Pre-order plans
When your cash is running low, it’s better to earn money for maintenance first and pre-order strategy is something you can consider.
The pandemic puts off several plans of businesses. If you have ideas, or even in-process products that have not released, choose the best among those and offer pre-order choices.
First of all, this will attract your loyal customers to camp. Second, it’s still regarded as a preparation step of further marketing strategy when the product comes out later on.
3. Inventory analysis
In this short term, retailers all try not to sit on cash held up in inventory or deadstock. Especially many non-essential businesses are falling in the situation when the economy is shrinking. Having underperforming products is preventable, even well-run companies have 20-30% of product type which does not sell well. But now it’s time to address those being in stock for too long because you are in need of cash fusion.
4. Relief resources
Marketing relief plans
Days before, you just normally run your marketing plans smoothly and try to reach out as many customers as possible. But the pandemic with diminished cash flow now offers you a chance to review your process, spend on tactics that give the highest return on investment because businesses need to be wise to spend at the moment.
Make sure to look into each of the marketing spendings wisely to pick the compatible ones to focus on. Great relief plans these days don’t necessarily focus on savings, but to take the intuitives and use money more effectively.
1. Messages adaptation
Catching up with the trends or special occasions is too familiar with any retailers. Covid-19 is one of the hottest news at the moment and attracts a lot of attention. Therefore, if you can build your related marketing contents or find any relation between your products and the event, it may benefit you more than ads.
However, businesses should be aware of the side effect as well. Don’t orient your readers or viewers out of the core brand messaging. Try not to appear opportunistic as well.
One of the smart ideas come from East Tiger Goods when they suggest their bundled stationary to officers working from home.
2. Social experiences
Self-quarantine puts customers and real-life experience apart for a long while, and they are constantly looking for these experiences on social media.
Knowing that their customers are having more free time and that they are more sensitive to contents, many enterprises invest more in ideas to leverage their social media presence.
An example of this marketing idea is virtual showrooms, live-streamed yoga classes… Try to think about how your business can apply these tactics.
3. Management team alterations
This Covid 19 business relief plan is more inclined to medium-sized brands.
Dealing with crisis is something that not all business have gone through. And neither are many of PR specialists. We all know that saving money is vital at the moment, but if any changes should be taken in terms of human resources, we must confirm that it’s worth the effort.
We suggest that you adjust the management team with those confident to take the right measures if anything occurs, those having different ideas for promotion during this difficult time. If something goes out in public, the team will be responsible.
Then, it should consist of some executive members as well as PR marketers. You should work with a PR agency as well in case the in-house personnel doesn’t have enough experience in the situation.
4. Relief resources
Business administration
Unemployment for a long time has persuaded no small number of employees to find a new job if the current workplace doesn’t offer good policies.
We understand that the situation is challenging to businesses as well because there are tons of things to pay for and the administrative system costs much. It is difficult to keep everything in the right place as before, but we believe that some of the following COVID 19 business relief plans may help.
1. Consistent update
Many loyal employees still choose to overcome the difficult time and be loyal but SME enterprises had better show the recognition and care to some extent. Leaders should frequently update essential employee determinations, alternative work arrangements, and paid leave. On the website, posting new contents also improves web-based communications. Furthermore, good assistance programs can inspire your employees in the long run, motivating them to contribute more and attract potential workers in the future thanks to the reputation.
2. Guidance for remote working
Providing detailed guidance to employees not only can help your management of quality but also support your workers with limited experience working remotely.
Leaders of teams should clarify scheduling and expectations. Furthermore, if any necessary tools and technology can help, you can inform them together with guidelines so that they undergo less difficulty and still remain the productiveness.
3. Necessary recognition
This difficult time also gives businesses wonderful chance to understand their workers. The past few weeks witnessed a lot of effort from workers in all fields to adapt to the new working conditions. So must be your employees.
Therefore, so-called rewards are not a big problem for creative leaders but may have a beyond-expectation impact.
For example, there are companies that publish an online form for members to submit notes of appreciation and these notes will be shown publicly on the website.
Or marketing team presents hard-working employees with short videos to recognize the efforts of other members of the company. More than an incentive, these actions also support the company’s culture. People are better embraced and feel more connected to your business core vision.
4. Relief resources
Conclusion
To sum up, we hope that above Covid 19 business relief plans can provide you some useful ideas and resources in order to alleviate negative effects from the current pandemic.
If you are looking for more tips to manage your business better, feel free to check out our blog page. We are pleased to bring any helpful information to you.
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