If your business is flood-affected

Has your business been flood-affected?

Ours has and it sux balls. We are lucky to be high and dry. We are unlucky with the power and internet for almost a week. It's back on now! Yey! Life is stressful enough without mother nature kicking our arse. No doubt you will be time poor like us. We spend most of our day tending to the needs of our minions, cleaning the old fashioned way, trips to the laundromat and cooking on the BBQ and camp stove. This all takes so much time.

Still, if you run your own business, the show must go on. We work on or in our business when we can. That can sometimes look like a trip to the local Maccas. At least they have power and Wifi. We have put together a list of ways you can communicate to your clients what's going down with your business when you will be back online. We are here to help.

Call them

A good old fashioned phone call. Not to every client, just the ones that will be most impacted. It's the quickest form of communication that allows you to connect directly with your clients. It may seem really freaking obvious but I can see all the introverts wigging out. If you don like to make calls or you have set your business up to not make them, then send a text. We have a few clients that are impossible to get on the phone but will always respond to text. Honestly whatever works between you and your clients.

Social media

If you have Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, TikTok or any other social platform, post there first. It's quick and easy. You don't need to overthink it. Just cold hard facts are fine. Keep updating. Clients and fans generally want to know how you are going. Add pictures of your current flood situation, clean up, teamwork any human interest stories are great for engagement on your page. Add to your Facebook or Instagram stories, these can be more light-hearted and fun. Now we all know how often people post in times of crisis and your post may get missed. Or your clients might not have social media. Or know you're on there too. That's ok we have a few more tricks up our sleeve.

Email campaigns

When was the last time you sent out an email campaign? Well, dust off that laptop it's time. An email campaign is a great way to slide right into your client's inbox. Keep them informed on what's happening with your business. While you're there, ask them to follow your social media for real-time updates. You could add to your following on Facey! Here are a few things you can do:

Draft an email in whatever you use (MS office, gmail etc) In To: add your email address, in BCC: add the email address of the clients you wnat to notify. This will send out to all those contacts in one go.
Sign up to Mailchimp or get us to do it for you send out your campaign from there, make sure they are clients you currently email. Don't spam everyone thats ever emailed you.

Email signature

If you are super, super time poor or just CBF creating social media posts and sending out email campaigns, then this is for you! Add a line of text in your email signature. Make it stand out by using a bold font or bright colour. That way every time you send an email or reply to one, there is a note there explaining your limited hours or delays in work.

Website

A banner on your website or e-commerce store is a great way to let your clients know there are disruptions to your services. You can take it further by:

Writing a blog about it! We are! You're reading it right now.
Add a web tile and text on your front page
Add the banner at the footer or on a service page

How to let your clients know your business is flood-affected

Update your Google Business Page

This is one of the best and we recommend you all do it. Head to your Google My Business page and update any hours. Write an update to let anyone who finds you via Google maps that your services are limited. It's easy to do. Head to your Google My Business profile and edit your deets there.

Let us help you grow

We hope this has helped you come up with some ideas on how to get your message out there. They may all seem pretty freaking obvious but there are a few little tricks in there to help your business grow in a shitty time. If you are on socials and you are posting updates make sure you tag us we are @misfitbranding across all social media. We will share your post on our stories and hopefully gain you some more followers.

WTF is SEO?

We hear the term SEO every day but do you really know what it means?

According to the Urban Dictionary it's:

Like Voodoo and Witchdoctors, SEO is an evil term used to describe the ways SEO Optimizers believe they can beat the system by making you believe they know what will get your search ranking to the top. Most of the time SEO is achieved by throwing darts or mixing chicken bones with blood.

They’re not wrong, but they also aren’t right….

The actual abbreviation stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Let's break it down further:

Search = Try to find something by looking or otherwise seeking carefully and thoroughly.

Engine = a machine with moving parts that converts power into motion.

Optimization = the action of making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource.

In this case, the engine is Google or Bing or whatever search engine you use. We play by Google's rules because they are the majority when it comes to search engines.

We feel SEO is a wanky marketing term used to scare business owners into thinking they need this thing…and if you have a website and digital profile, you do need SEO. BUT we don’t think it relates just to your website.

Traditionally SEO is the process used to optimize a website's:

technical configuration (how it’s put together)
content relevance (keywords and copy)
link popularity so its pages can become easily findable
more relevant and popular towards user search queries, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better

Search engines recommend SEO that benefits both the user search experience and the page’s ranking. By featuring content that fulfils user search needs. This includes the use of relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and headlines (H1), featuring descriptive URLs with keywords rather than strings of numbers, and schema markup to specify the page's content meaning, among other SEO best practices. If your head is spinning, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most misunderstood terms when it comes to websites and digital marketing.

You need SEO

If you have a website, you need SEO. You can have the best looking website in the word but if the SEO isn’t set up then how will people find it? Setting the foundations for your websites SEO is a leg up. Considering that Google processes billions of search queries daily, organic search results are a very large slice of a very large pie. And while there is some up-front and ongoing investment required to secure and maintain organic rankings, every click that sends traffic to your website is completely free.

We also feel SEO encompasses your entire business online profile. From your website to your social media and any other online digital profile used. Here is why:

Social media provides backlinks to your website
The copy used in your social media should reflect the messages on your website. Focusing on your sites keywords
Hashtags on Linkedin, Instagram and TikTok all created around your sites keywords
Names of images used on all socials and digital profiles. Images are the most overlooked and easy to do with relation to SEO.
File names and overall look of your designs.

Are you picking up what we are putting down?

We are saying to fully improve your SEO, focus on your website, social media and digital profiles. It also ties in with brand consistency and messaging so you are kinda killing 2 x birds with 1 x stone. Not that we are a pack of bird killers. Have you seen our website and socials? 2 x of our staff members are parrots.

Are you interested to see how your site and digital profiles stack up?

We are here to help you reach your SEO goals with a Free Website Checkup. You get a PDF report and explainer video. All valued at $150 + GST. Totally custom and free.

Take me to the free website check up

HOT TIP 💡 If you need help with your SEO we work with foundations only, not ongoing SEO. When looking for an agency to play the long game with SEO for your business, look for someone that comes reccomended or works soley with SEO. As in they don't do all the things, they do SEO and they do it well.