Today I want to talk about how you can turn up online even though your hospitality business is shut down. 

• The first thing is have you got local Facebook groups for your local community?
• Could you turn up there?
• Could you be offering help?
• Are there people in your community that struggle to get to the shop still?
• Struggle to get a time slot with the online delivery services?
• Could you use your network and buying power and contact your suppliers to help them with their grocery shopping?
• Are they struggling with other things that you could perhaps be seen to show up and help?

Even though one of my clients is still shut, they are turning up and he’s doing the cooking for their local community who are then feeding vulnerable people. I think they recently did nearly two hundred meals. So various other businesses in the area are sponsoring the ingredients and my client is simply using his commercial kitchen and his time to cook the meals. 

The other thing you can look at is daily hashtags on social media. 

One that comes to mind is on a Thursday which is called #ThrowbackThursday or #TBT. It’s an opportunity to go through your back catalogue of social media posts and see if there’s anything relevant, that hasn’t really changed, that you could perhaps repost or you could update. 

It might be for instance you might have had a classic car rally on that day in the past, you might have had a member of staff who won an award, it’s things that you can just repost. 

The other thing is to look at awareness days, awareness weeks during a month. I use a website I think it’s called AwarenessDays.com or it might be .co.uk There they list events and awareness days during the month. 

For instance History Month.

• So have you got a historic pub?
• Have you got history?
• Have you got old photographs?
• Have you got old anecdotes you can talk about the pub that you can post out there using the relevant hashtag to that day?

There’s an allergy awareness week too, can you do posts around how you deal with allergies? And educating people with how you would cope with that? 

There’s also a national Coeliac week which coincides with that allergy week. Could you post videos and recipe suggestions of Coeliac friendly dishes? You might have one on your menu that people don’t know how to cook at home, so maybe you could video yourself or your chef, subject to self isolating, cooking that meal. 

But whatever you post it has to be in line with your brand. 

So if you’re a rock music venue and you start posting about jazz or classical music, I would suggest your audience won’t appreciate that.

If you’re worried about how to post and the time it takes, there are loads of tools out there that you can schedule posts that will help you. If you’re looking for a good source of tried and tested software, go to ItsNomad9.com/Recommendations it’s a great source there, they have tried, tested and they use all their recommended software. I use some of the products that they have done. 

So make sure you’re out there, you’re still promoting yourself, you’re still engaging with your community and you are keeping that engagement in line with your brand and your brand voice. 

We can, we will come out of this, but at the moment if you’re promoting yourself, you will be better placed for when we come out of lockdown whenever that is. And hopefully then all your audience will then be back supporting you by coming into the venue. 

That’s it for today, look forward to bringing you some more hints and tips in the future.