The bounce back for New York businesses is coming.
“The minute it’s safe to come out and play in New York, New York will resume,” said Shark Tank real estate agent Barbara Corcoran in a May Q&A hosted by New York Residential Agent Continuum. “New York always comes back because somebody always wants it. The somebody changes but somebody always wants it.”
So, the “when” is uncertain, but it’s coming.
To help prepare local businesses for a return to semi-normalcy, we introduce “Schneps Insights — Grow Your Business.” In this column, we’ll be sharing the lessons we’ve learned about building an audience, a customer base, in the hopes that you can apply them to grow your audience and your business too.
OUR BACKSTORY
In many ways, we are just like you. Our backstory begins in 1985 when The Queens Courier debuted. Like so many small businesses, it started on a shoestring budget ($250), with ads taken out by friends and relatives of publisher Victoria Schneps-Yunis.
Sound familiar?
Today, that small seedling of a local newspaper has grown into a mighty oak of dozens of websites, community newspapers, daily newspapers, magazines, events, and, during the COVID-19 crisis, webinars. We reach more than 4 million unique visitors each month, with more than 300,000 email subscribers receiving our newsletters each day and hundreds of thousands more following our social channels.
We’ve come a long way from that local Queens newspaper, but the mission has not changed.
How have we done it?
- By producing local news from authentic and trusted sources — trustworthiness is the DNA of all successful brands and businesses.
- We recognized the importance of being relevant in the digital world — now more than ever. It takes the investment of time, energy and dollars to focus on improving with the times and staying ahead of the curve.
During this lockdown, it’s time for business owners to regroup, assess what your strengths and weaknesses are, and to fill in the gaps that exist in your marketing and customer acquisition strategy.
The first step? We’ll deal with that in our next column — how to craft an email to your customers to announce your reopening plans.
Interested in discussing your digital strategy and goals? Have ideas about what you’d like Schneps Insights to cover? Let’s talk!
For more business coverage, visit longislandpress.com/category/business
