The lockdown of so many countries across the globe has impacted businesses both big and small. Airlines and hotels are laying off thousands while businesses are struggling to stay afloat.
The impact of COVID-19 will be felt for potentially years to come. But with the downturn comes opportunity. Your business needs to adapt and capitalize on new trends in order to thrive. This is essential in order to continue to serve your customers, provide for your employees and build a stable foundation for the future.
Your Audience Has Problems That Never Existed Before
This is your opportunity to provide value and help solve their problems while creating an engaged audience. Google Trends offers great insights about what people are searching for with daily and weekly trends.
Here’s what’s been important to people over the past month.
Cooking
With restaurants, bakeries and diners closed, people are cooking at home more than ever. Google Trends data shows cooking-related searches tend to peak during holiday seasons, but another spike has been taking place ever since the start of the coronavirus crisis.
Look at how Tealive in Malaysia has created a new Bubble Tea Kit complete with recipes so people can still get their bubble tea fix.
You can also deliver meal kits with fresh ingredients to teach people how to recreate your dishes at home.
Shake Shack has teamed up with Goldbelly, a delivery service, to ship its fresh 100% Angus beef blend, cheese and Shack sauce so that anyone can create a Shackburger meal from the comfort of their own home.
Meditation
In this time of stress and uncertainty, meditation and wellness is becoming a focus to help people retain mental clarity and emotional calm.
Meditation has had a steady upwards trend in the past 5 years but has increased sharply in the past month as people look for calm in the midst of sensationalized and fear-mongering news headlines.
If you are a wellness or meditation coach, you can hold virtual meditation retreats, daily meditations and release more guided meditation tracks.
With schools closed and parents working from home, kids’ boundless energy can drive even the calmest parent crazy. Share meditation tracks or tutorials for kids to help them to start meditating and find their inner calm.
Chris Hemsworth, who famously played Thor in the Marvel Avengers movies, has released free guided meditations for kids to help children process their anxiety and stress when they do not know how to express it.
Removing gel manicures (and other beauty routines)
Your first reaction to the lockdown may not have been “What am I going to do about my nails?!” but regular visits to nail or brow salons have been disrupted, leading to a new surge in how-to videos for removing gel manicures and trimming brows.
Take a look at the women having a dilemma whether they should grow out their eyebrows or learn to trim it.
If you own a beauty salon, you have probably been one of the hardest hit by the COVID-19 quarantine. But you certainly can keep engaging with clients by posting how-to videos and promoting products they need for their personal maintenance at home. The good news is that beauty therapy is the #1 activity women are anticipating at the end of the quarantine.
Staying relevant and top of mind with engaging and relevant content will help keep and grow clients as businesses begin to re-open. If you’ve been putting in the effort to keep in touch with customers, they’ll remember you.
Cutting hair
To the guys, you might have never imagined you couldn’t go to your local barber and get a haircut.
Look how little interest there was in cutting your own hair with clippers until recently.
Barbers, this is the time to start creating content.
Create how-to videos to teach your clients how to get a clean and stylish haircut and promote hair care products that can help them look good even in the midst of self-isolation.
Even the New York Times has recently published tutorials on how to get a buzz cut, and GQ ranks the best hair clippers for men.
There is demand out there, and you need to meet it!
Recreating paintings
People are spending more time on hobbies, and they’re looking for new paintings to recreate. This all started when the Getty Museum in Los Angeles asked people to recreate famous paintings using objects in their homes, and look how interest has surged out of nowhere.
You may be a school that teaches classes in arts and crafts that had to stop classes due to the quarantine.
There is a new opportunity for you to create tutorials and leverage on what’s popular in your field to engage with people as they have plenty of time to try new things.
Your content has a global reach and potentially paves the way for new customer segments in the future.
Crisis Brings Transformation
Businesses that learn to evolve become stronger and some of the biggest companies today were forged in times of crisis.
Take action to capitalize on new trends so you can build stability in your business in these difficult times.
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about this blog post or wish to discuss a project.
We would love to hear from you!
