The unprecedented times that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought people across the country feelings of fear, tragedy, doubt and uncertainty. As lockdown measures are taken across the world, most of humanity has been taking the necessary precautions to “flatten the curve”, so that life can back to normal and so that people are free to roam without fear again.
The lockdown measures across the planet have created unimaginable stress on businesses that depend on foot traffic and consumerism to stay alive. This has put the livelyhood of every day people even more at risk as businesses make cuts to mitigate the unavoidable damage that the pandemic has brought to the economy.
One industry that has been especially effected during this time is the hospitality industry. Restaurants and bars depend on daily foot traffic from breakfast, lunch and dinner to make the tight margins that most hospitality businesses experience. Food becoming more expensive, supply chain being disrupted, foot traffic being grinder to a halt, with no definite timeline on when things will go back to normal, hospitality owners have been feeling the tremendous weight of the situation.
To make things worse, much of the United States Economic relief programs have fell short for the hospitality industry, as banks are making it increasingly difficult for restaurants and bars to qualify for loans that they are in dire need for.
So, as you can imagine, when I interviewed Michael Valor, the CEO of Valor Media a media and marketing company, and he told me that a large percentage of his business was hospitality clients, I was Very interested in what he had to say about how his company responded to the COVID-19 crises.
I asked him, what was his companies initial response when the lockdown measures were announced in the United States? “We knew right away that our restaurant clients were going to be hit the hardest, we’ve worked intimately with hospitality owners for the last 3 years and so we understood what kind of stress this was going to create. We immediately pushed back their billing periods 4 weeks, and even gave some customers the opportunity to pay half cost depending on the situation. That was announced in a newsletter a day after lockdown was announced.”
Valor told us that that move alone retained 95% of his hospitality business, his done was not done there though, he knew there was a lot to be done, “Next thing we knew was that social media was about to get 10x more important for our clients. It was basically the only way that their customers were going to be able to check their food out, and the most direct way to lead people to their websites so that they could make an order. After studying the market for 2 weeks into the lockdown, we came out with a comprehensive guide for our clients that gave them 10 attritionalways to tangibly leverage social media during this pandemic. Already our services are doing so much for them, with our custom messaging and daily out reach, but the guides really helped some of our clients see the light in the situation and make the most of what life is offering us right now.”
Michael mentioned that he would be more than happy to share that guide with anyone interested in learning more about what they could be doing on social media during a time where people are on their phones and computers more than ever…
You can find out more about Valor Media on their website, https://thevalormedia.com/
or their instagram https://instagram.com/valormarketing
