The art of the strategic pivot has long been underrated as an element of the business toolbox. That is until the COVID-19 pandemic turned everything upside down and forced businesses of all kinds to pivot on the fly. Distilleries began producing hand sanitizer, home decor companies debuted new lines of video conference backdrops and untold numbers of other businesses made quick adjustments to stay afloat in an incredibly challenging market. 
And since experts say that herd immunity will likely not arrive until Q2 of 2021 at the earliest, it’s still crucial for small businesses to stay ready to pivot if they must. Business owners should check out this list of smart pivot strategies for the COVID-19 era and think about which ones would be most helpful for making your business ready for anything. 

Pivoting to Remote Work

If workers at your business can perform their jobs remotely, hopefully, they’ve already been doing that during the pandemic. But businesses would be wise to examine a long-term strategy for remote work because there are numerous potential advantages for executing this pivot. 
Advantages of pivoting to a fully or partially remote model include: 
  • null
  • null
  • null
  • null
Of course, remote work isn’t without its challenges. You’ll need to address challenges such as: 
  • null
  • null
  • null
  • null

Pivoting Products and Services

The basic law of success in business is that you must supply what your customers demand. The market disruptions caused by COVID have created major demand fluctuations for all kinds of commodities, from an explosion in demand for toilet paper and hand sanitizer to a sharp drop in demand for transportation fuels. 
Thus, many businesses have had to devise a method for providing products and services that meet customer demands vastly different from the ones they catered to a year ago. Some great examples of this strategy include: 
  • null
  • null
  • null
  • null
  • null
  • null

Pivoting Audiences and Marke

For some businesses, it will be necessary to entirely change the audience and/or market that your business serves. Many businesses have found markets shifting around them as they navigate the pandemic, with new demographics suddenly entering the picture and old ones becoming (at least temporarily) less relevant. 
One great example of this strategy in action: Red Roof Inns began offering daily rates on its rooms to remote workers who need a quiet, secure workspace with good WiFi. Rather than letting their rooms sit open as the pandemic decimated both business and recreational travel, they instead opted to create an offering that appeals to a different (and rapidly expanding) market. 
When employing a market pivot strategy, it’s important to let the needs of the market be your guide. Make sure to ground any market pivot in solid demographic research and an understanding of your business’s core offerings and assets. 
Your marketing department should be an asset here. Remember that the word “marketing” doesn’t just mean advertising. It also means learning who your market actually is and how to segment your offerings to meet the needs of that market. Marketing departments should be using tools like web search analytics and customer surveys to understand your demographics and how they match up with your offerings. 

Pivoting Channels

The growth of the omnichannel marketplace (including eCommerce, brick-and-mortar and mobile shopping) had already become one of the major narratives of 21st-century commerce heading into the 2020s. Then, as COVID-19 turned the world upside down, many markets saw the transition to eCommerce accelerate in a massive, rapid and unpredictable manner. 
If your business hasn’t been on top of its omnichannel game, now is the time to fix that. In fact, it might be your last chance. Businesses that aren’t equipped to compete in an omnichannel marketplace face increasingly poor prospects as an ever-greater share of commerce shifts to the digital sphere. 
One fairly obvious way to enact this pivot is to focus on building a frictionless eCommerce experience. Businesses should work with web and software developers to ensure that their websites and apps are user-friendly and fit for purpose. Mobile shopping is an especially important channel that should be a priority for development and refinement. 
A channel pivot may also involve creative repurposing of brick-and-mortar assets. For example, some grocery companies shuttered their brick-and-mortar stores to shoppers and transformed them into fulfillment centers instead. This transformation has been a crucial tool for fulfilling grocery delivery orders in a rapidly transforming omnichannel marketplace by creating fulfillment assets that are already located in the communities that these businesses serve. 
Hardly any business has been left untouched by the coronavirus pandemic. To survive, businesses must do what they’ve always done: Find opportunity even in places where it might seem unlikely and pivot into strategies that will make them more flexible, more agile and more useful to the economy. 

WRITTEN BY

Clara Rose