Special Offers Archives

How to Market in Times of COVID-19?

The coronavirus situation has been a difficult experience for businesses of all sizes. However, the most vulnerable are small and medium-sized businesses from different industries. In particular, the ones facing interaction with customers in this challenging social distancing and self-isolation.

While many cities are still in lockdown and people keep avoiding public places, most of the nonessential businesses have been forced to close down. This new reality brings significant changes in the overall shopping behavior of people all around the world. Customers start changing what they buy, where, when, and how.

Fortunately, many business owners and managers realized the new shopping behavior of their customers and the need to adapt and be flexible to meet changing necessities. And the importance of online presence for most online shops. Those businesses will need management software, cyber-security measures, as well as digital marketing tools for advertising.

Marketing Tips to Help Your Business

It doesn’t matter if you’re new to marketing or already have developed a marketing strategy for your business. Marketing during hard times requires sensitivity. And here are some general tips on how to market during COVID-19. Let’s go through them:

1. Stay Relevant to Your Consumer’s Needs

One of the best ways to stay relevant in these uncertain times is to tell your customers how your company is dealing with the pandemic. Tell relevant, authentic stories – to show your customers that you’re there during these difficult times. And stay hopeful for the future.

2. Be Supportive of Your Customers

Try and show empathy and support in all your communications with your customers. Tell your customers what you’re doing to help the community and try to make their life easier. This will show your customers that they’re in good hands and that they made the right decision for choosing your company.

3. Focus on Your Digital Channels

This is a good time to review and implement new digital strategies for your online business. Here are some key areas to focus on:

Reanalyze your overall marketing plan focusing on your story, site, and data.
Identify user questions related to your business and address them on your blog.
Create your SEO strategy and start optimizing your website. Extensions like SEO Toolkit can help you maximize your search engine traffic.
Do some keywords research.
Update your Google My Business listings.

4. Be Present on Social Media

Publish content that’s relevant to the reality of your audience. And tell how your brand can solve their problems. Focus on strengthening your relationship with your customers by answering their questions and sharing their stories. It’s important to encourage your customers to be kind and help each other in your own example. You can take a look at other resources from our blog for tips on how to use social media effectively.

5. Implement Email Marketing to Your Overall Marketing Strategy

It’s no secret that email marketing is one of the cheapest and most profitable marketing activities you can apply in your marketing strategy. Nowadays, it’s a good time to keep your customers updated about your business, products, and novelties. So, don’t forget to send good vibes and remind people of the good in the world.

6. Offer Discounts and Promotions

Offering discounts in days of crisis can help not only attract new customers, but also in gaining loyalty among existing customers, driving traffic to your site, and increasing your sales. You can do charitable sales promotions which can boost conversion as customers may purchase items for themselves by doing good for others.

A Final Word

We know that we’re all somehow being affected by these unprecedented times. And therefore at Plesk, we want to help bring businesses like yours online with our special offers. Take a look at our current plans and find the option that best fits your business.

Is your business suffering the effects of the pandemic? What changes have you implemented to keep your business afloat? Let us know in the comments below. We’re here to help.

Enable Security for Your Business and Teams Even When Remote

Hackers are a notoriously opportunistic lot, and the global COVID-19 pandemic fits their agenda perfectly. According to UK Web security firm Cloudflare, online threats rose by as much as six times their usual levels in the early weeks of the outbreak. Based on the 2020 Data Breaches Investigation Report by Verizon, 28% of the breach victims were small businesses. And from an Accenture report from last year, 68% of business leaders felt their cybersecurity risks are increasing. It’s no wonder that in the wake of recent trends, security has become a top priority for small and medium businesses.

Choose Targeted Security Solutions

“WordPress Toolkit security scanner goes beyond the basics and implements the latest security recommendations and best practices from WP Codex and WP security experts.”

Marcus Krämer, CEO of HostPress

At Plesk, our goal is to prioritize your privacy and safeguard your data and business from security threats. Our tools provide targeted solutions for common security issues with little to no manual work. For example, we asked Marcus Krämer, the founder and CEO of HostPress, about the value WordPress Toolkit brings to their Managed WordPress hosting business. Marcus told us that, “WordPress Toolkit security scanner goes beyond the basics and implements the latest security recommendations and best practices from WP Codex and WP security experts.”

Key Recommendations to Improve Security

Recently, we also talked to Plesk’s Security Engineer, Igor Antipkin, about recommendations that can help you improve your project’s security. Igor outlined the following steps for anyone considering to take proper security approaches:

1. Use threat modeling to identify potential security risks.

As a first step, consider your security risks in the project design phase. List down all kinds of threats you might have. One advantage of using this approach is minimizing the likelihood of security breaches. It also saves you rework in the later stages of your project.

2. Inform yourself and your users about security risks.

Outdated software is the most common problem in this scenario. Make sure that your users know to keep software up to date and all the latest updates and patches are installed. Inform yourself about software security as much as you can. Stay involved in the community to stay up to date about potential issues.

3. Use the principle of least privileges.

Limit user permissions based on individual roles to give access where it’s needed. This limits the amount of damage any single individual can do to a website or server.

Special Offers

To round up, our umbrella of tools with a focus on security include:

Our self-hosted email and collaboration suite, Plesk Premium Email, powered by Kolab. It includes a secure, private file cloud using Seafile and a secure team messaging platform using Mattermost. You can also enhance email security with the Plesk Email Security extension.
If you use Plesk with WordPress, you can use the WordPress Toolkit to optimize your site’s security. WordPress Toolkit hardens your site by default and is enhanced with the Toolkit’s security scanner, which provides up-to-date recommendations for managing site security.
If you are a hosting reseller, with Plesk’s Web Host Edition you can easily manage teams. You have the ability to set permissions for individual users, developers, designers and content managers, who can seamlessly collaborate across multiple projects. You can also create customer accounts so that external administrators can manage their own services. The edition comes with security for protection from malicious users.

Currently, you can get 6 months free for Plesk Premium Email, 6 months free for WordPress Toolkit for 3 months free for Plesk Web Host Edition. Additional details about these offers can be found here.

We understand that these unprecedented times have brought unprecedented circumstances to us all. You can reach out to our team for support. And let us know in the comments if you’d like to share how your business is doing in the current situation.

Kolab Mattermost Plesk Email Security Plesk Premium Email Plesk WordPress Toolkit podcast Seafile security Self-Hosted Email Special Offers

Helping You Stay Open and Connected During the COVID-19 Crisis

Strong businesses and communities are driven by people. We’ve responded to COVID-19 by doing whatever we can to keep your business open and our workforce safe. Our services are up and running and our remote teams are ready to help. At Plesk, about two-thirds of our more than 250 employees work from home. Currently, this number is even higher. Working from home doesn’t have to mean your company is less effective. In fact, when done right, a remote workforce can be efficient and happy.

Enabling A Remote Workforce

As your web host and cloud partner, Plesk is here to get you online. With products that power business — now — when it matters most. There are several Plesk extensions that make it easy for your team to communicate and collaborate, and track each other’s progress for multiperson projects.

“Having the right tools in your business can make all the difference, especially when times are turbulent or in transition.”

Frank Garcia, CEO of Co-Solutions

Plesk’s suite of email and collaboration tools, Plesk Premium Email, powered by Kolab, comes integrated with real-time and interactive team solutions. With our email tool, you can synchronize email, calendars, contacts, files, and notes on any desktop or mobile device. We talked to Frank Garcia, CEO of Co-Solutions about how his team is coping with the sudden transition to remote office. “Having the right tools in your business can make all the difference, especially when times are turbulent or in transition,” He noted. “For our remote teams, there are four tools that we absolutely cannot live without, Plesk Premium Email, Seafile, Mattermost, and Collabora.”

The Seafile extension acts as your secure, private file cloud. The extension allows you to store big files and images in Seafile. The Mattermost extension for Plesk Premium Email serves as a secure messaging platform. It allows for teams to have greater connectivity, daily conversations and mini-celebrations. With the Collabora Online extension, teams can focus on collaborating directly on documents, spreadsheets and presentations in real-time.

Takeaways from Managed Cloud Services

Managed cloud services provide business continuity and agility, which are extremely valuable for companies in periods of uncertainty and crisis. Some of our partners have been very agile in adapting and launching new managed services to respond to their customers’ needs.

A good example is NetNation, a leading provider of white-label web service solutions that has built a new generation of managed WordPress to help customers operate their business in these unprecedented circumstances.

We talked to Alex Goncharov from Product Management at NetNation about the WordPress Toolkit — Plesk’s solution for managed WordPress hosting. He told us that, “From online ordering to day-to-day management, WordPress Toolkit has provided a complete solution for our Gate.com brand’s Managed WordPress offering.”

We also talked to Niclas Alvebratt, CEO of Beebyte. Beebyte has been a Plesk partner for a year and a half now. It offers a unique and custom-built control panel for virtual servers, VPS, and shared hosting. Beebyte offers Shared WordPress hosting as one of its main, high-performance solutions.

“Adding the Plesk management layer to hosting services or managed WordPress offering has helped us grow beyond unmanaged services.”

Niclas Alvebratt, CEO of Beebyte

Niclas told us that, “Adding the Plesk management layer to hosting services or managed WordPress offering has helped us grow beyond unmanaged services”. Today, Beebyte is at the top when it comes to WordPress and e-commerce hosting in Sweden, regardless of whether it’s shared hosting, VPS, or multi-server load-balanced solutions. Thanks to its success, Beebyte can focus on continued services to all its users.

Special Offers

We’ve put together some new offers to help you adapt during these uncertain times. All new offers can be found on our pricing page.

Free 6 months of Plesk Premium Email for a yearly subscription, including Seafile and Mattermost for secure file sharing and team messaging.
Free 3 months of Plesk Web Host Edition for a yearly subscription. The package includes unlimited domains, full reseller account, subscription and hosting plan management.
Free 6 months WordPress Toolkit for a yearly subscription, including remote management for agencies.

We will continue to monitor the COVID-19 situation very closely, and further increase our commitment to meet the changing demand patterns within the various industries in which we serve.

Thank you for your continued support and please do not hesitate to contact us.

Stay healthy,
Plesk