The past year has left the businesses still dwindling on the platform of unforeseen changes. Irrespective of the size of the businesses, all have suffered losses and a reduction in consumers’ demands. The economic impact has made the businesses financially fragile. Midst this random chaos, re-realizing the business goals and accomplishing the objectives is the primary aim of all the organizations to be able to re-establish a firm ground in the industrial sector.

Impact of Covid-19 on Various Businesses

In terms of the various businesses, in the retail and primary goods sector, the bigger brands have seen a hike in consumer demands. Contrary to this the technology sector has suffered in various areas,

• Raw material supply has got affected.
• The electronics value chain has got disrupted.
• It has caused an inflationary risk on the products and services.
• The focus has shifted to re-evaluating and de-risking the end-to-end value chain.
• The travel and hospitality sectors have seen major shutdowns and downfall in the business owing to zero demands.

Contradictory to the negative impact on the hardware sector, the software has seen a boom:

• Demand for specialized cloud infrastructure has increased.
• The requirement of software for tackling tech stack as well as tools for disaster management has increased significantly.
• The pharmaceutical companies have seen a noticeable rise in demands.

How and Where have the Consumer’s Habits Changed?

Even though the consumer goods sector and the retail stream were left shaken, the service providers have seen a major variation in the shopping habits of the consumers.

• The demands of products and services with high values and variable costs have risen.
• Consumers have been switching from their usual brands to other brands owing to the easy availability of the latter.
• The above criteria helped in accelerating the highest absolute growth of the brands in demand.

How can the Businesses Grow in 2021? What Should be Their Objective?

The common point in all businesses is their focus being on digital transformation. Strategic marketing is the primary criteria and most effective way to re-establish any business post-2020 COVID chaos. Various effective B2B growth trends which the businesses can adopt are:

1. A business should realize that if their production value is good and their services are at par with the current competition and consumer’s demands, the primary focus should be on building a strong vendor-to-customer relationship.
2. With the pressure of the competition in the current business scenario rising, it is wiser to focus on strengthening relationships with the ideal customers. This can be done by analyzing the internal data of the past customers and by deepening the focus on creating a customer profile.
3. Research shows that 51% of the brands are discovered on social media channels. Involving social media influencers can be a positive move in spreading the word about certain products and services and gaining customers.
4. Effective communication is an important part of post brand or service posting on social media sites. It is the direct engagement with the customers that determines the brand visibility in the market. Consistency and building a business model is the key to success.
5. Post offers and reaches out to the customers by gearing the offers at a personal level.

Even though companies around the world have seen setbacks, yet, many have catered to the consumers’ needs and have thereby let their businesses stay afloat amidst the crisis. Among all this chaos, what the companies need to recognize is that it is the consumers’ need and their faith in the service providers which have strengthened the fact that vendor-consumer relation is the basis of an organization’s success.

“Most consumers don’t mind hearing from brands as long as it is a solution, where we are not trying to sell something, but we are trying to solve something.”

– Kelly Fredrickson – CEO of MullenLowe