When the going gets tough, get creative with your time and focus. Here are 28 things you can do to build and grow your creative biz during the #Coronapocalypse.
Build Content
- Bust out your tripod and start getting creative with capturing new images for your Instagram, website, and product catalog.
- If you are a personal brand or influencer, bolster your selfie stash and experiment with new themes and textures around the house.
- Write out a list of topics or common questions and answers as it relates to your zone of genius and plan a daily roster of things to talk about on Instagram/Facebook/YouTube Live.
- Draft up new social media themes/campaigns through the end of the year: Build design boards. Pinterest it up. Create templates for future social media posts in Canva.
- Use Google Trends to discover new ideas of topics to write about for your blog and build a content calendar for the next 45 days.
- Create something new inspired by what you’re grateful for as it relates to your creative biz.
- Get creative with textures, times of day, fabric, lighting, and other elements when you capture images or video for your social media content.
Connect With Your Audience
- If you haven’t written a newsletter to your list in over 90 days, draft up a reintroduction e-mail reminding your audience how they got on your list, promising more content moving forward, and ending with an offer or well wishes.
- Dust off a long dormant social media account (*cough cough* Twitter) and hook into trending hashtags for inspiration on how to create on-the-fly updates.
- Craft a daily Instagram Live topic to discuss with your audience: Wellness while stuck inside, meal prepping for quarantine, coping with anxiety in uncertain times, your creative inspirations for new artwork, audience input for new music.
- Answer questions pertinent to your areas of expertise in Facebook Groups, on Quora, and Reddit.
- Offer live Q & A using Facebook Live or speak on a topic relevant to your audience or even to share your daily thoughts on life during Coronavirus.
- See how your business can partner with area businesses to create positive impact on a local level.
- Reach out to podcasters to see if there are opportunities to discuss your area of expertise as it relates to living through the Coronavirus pandemic.
Take Out Social Media Ads
When many folks freak out about their business, it’s usually the ad spend and marketing budget that are the first to be pulled back. Now is a great time to take out an evergreen ad for your small business that is appropriate considering the current climate on Facebook and Instagram: Take out an ad for your Facebook Group, for folks to join an upcoming challenge, download a tutorial or whitesheet, or access something educational. With more people than ever at home and on their devices, your ad spend will reach a larger audience in your niche.
A quick way to target your ad to the right audience is to build a lookalike audience based on your web traffic, Facebook business page likes, e-mail list. Depending on what you are promoting, you can also retarget traffic that abandoned a shopping cart, visited a specific page on your website recently, or opened an e-mail from you in the last 30 days.
Polish Up Your Digital Appearance
Now is an EXCELLENT time to revisit your LinkedIn profile and ensure it is up-to-date with your most current achievements, job responsibilities, accolades, and blog posts. Consider setting up a social media management dashboard to load up content to your LinkedIn feed. If you are a freelancer/solopreneur/artist, consider setting up a LinkedIn business page with your work.
Facebook Biz Page
If you don’t remember the last time that you updated your Facebook biz page, you may be in for a pleasant surprise, as there are a new bevy of templates and features to help you sell products and services, get appointment scheduled, and invited prospective customers to chat with you in Messanger. Spend some time exploring the new Facebook business page features, and then create new collateral for your Facebook page cover and other assets using Canva.com.
Instagram Page
Ensure your bio and link in profile are up-to-date and reflect why you are on Instagram and how you want people to connect with you. Consider updating your Highlight covers and main profile image. You may want to do a sweep of under-performing posts in your feed or images that don’t work anymore for your look and archive the posts versus deleting them.
In Conclusion
- Use any unexpected available time to work on those back-burner digital marketing tasks that have been piling up.
- Consider taking out a Facebook ad to build your e-mail list, increase Facebook likes or Instagram follows, or build brand awareness.
- Instead of freaking out about what you can’t control right now, use that energy to build and create new infrastructure for your creative endeavors so you’ll be ready to hit the ground running when the Coronavirus fog lifts.
