POST Promise: How Businesses Can Keep Employees Safe From COVID-19

If you’re getting ready to reopen your workplace (or maybe you already have), chances are you’ve thought long and hard about how to implement new policies and procedures to keep your employees safe and help prevent the spread of COVID-19. Enter Canada’s POST Promise.

There is a lot of information – and misinformation – out there, but POST Promise is a Canadian platform we’ve recently discovered that helps businesses by providing communications and implementation tools to help educate their staff on the Five Steps to Workplace Safety – keeping everyone healthy and keeping businesses open!

We’re always looking for ways to be a source of advice for and support small businesses in our local community, so we thought we’d pass along the information so you, your staff, and your customers can be confident in a safe reopening.

What are the Five Steps?

The Five Key Steps to Workplace Safety in the POST Promise program are based on the guidelines recommended by the Public Health Agency of Canada:

  1. Maintain physical distancing.
    • Keeping a distance of at least 2 meters
  2. Stay home if unwell
    • Self-monitor for symptoms such as cough, fever, or difficulty breathing
  3. Practice respiratory etiquette.
    • Cough or sneeze into the bend of your arm, or wear a face mask when social distancing is not possible.
  4. Clean and disinfect all surfaces and common areas regularly
  5. Wash and sanitize hands
    • Wash hands for at least 20 seconds

How does it work?

First, businesses participate in an online training and education process which includes a declaration to implement the five steps to workplace safety listed above. You then receive communication and implementation tools to educate staff and can display the POST Promise logo to let customers know you’re committed to keeping your business safe for everyone.

A not-for-profit organization has been set up to provide oversight to the program, with a Board of Directors that includes both senior business leaders and public health experts. Their focus is on creating a solution to help Canadians safely begin returning to the community; something we’d all like to see in our future.

COVID-19 has really put a bend in the business plans most of us had for 2020, regardless of how big or small our organization is. Now that we’re slowly starting to return to work, it’s important we support each other through the reopening phase and make sure our employees and customers are kept safe.

The POST Promise program is a great way to show that commitment and support each other getting back on our feet.

Will you participate? How have you been preparing to reopen? We’d love to hear from you.

LinkedIn Pulse: Why It’s Easy For Every Small Business In Canada To Become Found Online

This has been a great week for 10|20! We’ve officially announced to our networks that we’ve launched. Our post on LinkedIn Pulse, titled, “Why It’s Easy For Every Small Business In Canada To Become Found Online” has generated almost 700 views in just 36 hours and countless messages of congratulations.

We’ve reposted the article here for you, but would encourage you to share, comment and like over on LinkedIn. And if you’d like to connect with us there, feel free reach out as well.

Jamie on LinkedIn | Mark on LinkedIn

Why It’s Easy For Every Small Business In Canada To Become Found Online

There are a number of tactics you can apply to become found online. As a small business owner, you can invest in a website, social media marketing, digital advertising, take a myriad of SEO approaches, attempt content marketing, online press releases, video production, and the list goes on.

The common issue for small business owners who attempt any of these approaches is that they each take a real investment of time and money to enjoy sustained success. And if you’re a dry cleaner, pizza shop owner, or run a small import/export company, marketing isn’t what you do best. No, you’re the best at removing stains, making the tastiest pizzas, or dealing with getting containers of goods over from China to Canada.

What you all have in common, though, is that you need people to call your business, find your location or visit your website. In fact, your business depends on it.

Consider these statistics:

  • 97% of smartphone users use a search engine on their mobile device at least once per week
  • 87% of smartphone owners make a search engine inquiry at least once a day
  • 86% of people view a menu online before dining out
  • 85% of consumers still prefer to shop in physical stores vs. online stores
  • 50% of local searches lead to a store visit within a day
  • 49% of local searches occur without a specific business in mind

Modern consumers start their shopping experience on search engines and review sites. The results they get from these networks determine where they spend their money, with reviews on each location’s listing helping them determine if a business is the right fit for them. As a result, if a business doesn’t appear in these local search results, the consumer will simply spend their money elsewhere.

So if you’re a small business owner in Canada, what’s your first priority for marketing your business? How do you maximize the return on your marketing investment? And how do you ensure that you can increase traffic through your doors or get your phone to ring?

That’s where our business comes in. With 10|20 Marketing involved, the process to ensure that your local businesses turns up on these critical networks is easy, time saving and automated. We will ensure that your location is consistently presented and error-free, that menus are online and easily updated, and reviews aggregated and monitored, so your business can enjoy improved findability and better overall search results across a number of engines.

The best part? This is an easy and cost-favourable way to market your business and get found. And it works beautifully with other marketing tactics that you may be considering or already doing. Getting found and having people walk through your door, though, is always the number one priority. And we can help you achieve that without breaking the bank.

To learn more about how 10|20 Marketing can help your business take the first step to being found online, just ask us and we’ll be happy to explain.

Introducing 10|20 Marketing

Hello! Welcome to 10|20 Marketing. As you can see, we’re blogging. We love to write and publish content designed to help small businesses across Canada (and elsewhere!) learn how to become more effective with local SEO, location marketing and getting found online. We hope you come to love our blog, but also want you to know that a full website is being planned too. So while we will continue to write new posts for you to enjoy, comment on and share, we’re also building and writing the rest of this website for launch soon.

In the meanwhile, here are some highlights of what we can do for retailers, restaurants and professionals:

  • Claim all your location listings on key search engines, review sites and mapping technologies, ensuring that they are consistent from one network to another.
  • Take your menu and put it on the most important sites and apps across the web so that new customers are able to find your restaurant or price-list based business (spa, salons, pet grooming, gyms, etc…) quickly and easily.
  • Monitor customer reviews and access them all through one single point of contact.
  • Measure your customer ratings across networks.

If you’re interested in learning more about our services, please reach out and connect. You can simply complete the form in the right-hand margin of our site, or email us directly:

  • Jamie@10-twenty.com
  • Mark@10-twenty.com

We also encourage you to read through our posts to date. Click through from here:

We look forward to helping you market your small business and hope to hear from you soon.