Such surreal times. We do not need to tell you what life has been like for us here at Seen&Read over the past few weeks as, broadly speaking, it has been the same as the life you have been experiencing. And let’s be honest, Linkedin is full to bursting with updates from people’s lockdown diaries.

Instead, we thought we would share an update on how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted our business and what you can expect to hear from us going forward.

Our COVID-19 update

First of all, to dispel any concerned questions that might be forming in your minds, we’re pleased to say that the business is fine.

We have a business model that, as it turns out, is exceptionally resilient to a massive global socio-economic crisis! At the most simplistic level, the fact that we predominantly use freelance writers, designers, animators, videographers, and so on, means that we can flex to any shift in client demand quite easily and with little pain. Fortunately, we haven’t actually seen any noticeable shift in workloads so we haven’t had to let any of our freelancers down.

To be clear, though, like every other agency we know, it hasn’t been plain sailing. We’ve had a couple of our content journey projects put on hold, which is a great shame, but it looks like those will restart shortly – it makes sense to put things on pause while the marketing team gets its ducks in a row.

The biggest frustration is that all our new business opportunities hit the pause button. But hey, we can live with a bit of new business delay given the amount of god-awful shit the world is going through right now.

Looking ahead

What next? Well, that’s the question isn’t it. A massive global depression seems to be an absolute certainty … although we are very, very happy to be proven wrong on that particular point!

But we’re not frightened of a recession. In a recession, businesses and their marketing teams need to work harder. Results matter and spend has to be justified. What we do ticks those buttons and some.

To survive and thrive in the months ahead, businesses are going to need content that engages and creates outcomes. That means that everything we do in terms of creating engaging content and, more importantly, connecting that content together into content journeys, will be in demand more than ever.

Speaking to colleagues and partners, looking at Linkedin and, dare I say it, watching and reading the news, it seems that here in the UK the tide is beginning to turn. The cold boilers of British business are being prepared to be lit once more.

So we think it’s time for all businesses, ourselves included, to start making some noise once more.

What we’re planning for the weeks ahead

We chose to stay silent during the lockdown period so far because we felt there was enough content out there being produced on a minute by minute basis about working from home, videoconferencing best practice, or simply ‘coping’ that we didn’t need to throw more into the mix. That’s yesterday’s content though.

Today we need to start talking about the future. Every business will have different perspectives and different guidance that they can offer. But it’s also time to stop simply ‘being supportive’ and it’s time to take some tentative steps to getting back to business.

For our part, that means we’re going to be doing two things. Firstly, we’re going to start a series of posts that will guide businesses on how to get their content house in order as we head towards a recession. Apologies if that seems a bit depressing but it’s a reality we all need to come to terms with.

Secondly, we’re going to talk about ourselves; what we do, what makes us different and why you might like to work with us. We suggest you think about doing the same because getting all of our businesses back up and running is the only sure fire way to get us all through this looming recession and back out the other side.