If you’re like most small business owners, you’re always looking for new and innovative ways to increase sales. And that’s a good thing! After all, increasing sales is the key to growing your business and reaching your goals. So, if you’re looking for some new marketing strategies to increase sales, keep reading.
Below are 10 ideas that you can use to boost sales for your small business. Happy selling!
Marketing in a Nutshell
Marketing is a crucial step in any company’s business model. The right marketing techniques attract an audience through high-quality messaging, which focuses on the company’s products or services or both.
Through in-depth research and analysis, a company can understand its target audience and market directly to them. Of course, as a marketer, if you understand your potential customers, then your marketing efforts are rewarded with increased sales and ROI.
First of all, it’s important to understand that there are many different types of marketing. In this article, we’ll be focusing on marketing through digital channels.
Here are some of the most effective digital marketing strategies that are still relevant today:
- Internet Marketing is a broad term that refers to marketing through any online channels.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of content optimization so that your content can have a higher rank in search engine result pages, or SERPs.
- Social Media Marketing is where posting on platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook comes into play.
- Blog Post Marketing is when brands write relevant blog content for their target groups. These articles are usually search engine optimized for the best results.
- Email Marketing Campaigns are when companies add subscribers to their list and email this group to promote things like new products, discounts, or vouchers.
- Video Content Marketing happens when marketers publish a video that entertains, educates, or advertises company products or services.
These marketing types are extremely valuable to small businesses and an important part of developing a marketing strategy. Next, we’ll tackle some ways to use these types of marketing to create a strategy that helps your small business increase sales.
10 Marketing Strategies
As early as the 60s, the 4P’s of marketing by E. Jerome McCarthy has been the go-to acronym in marketing. This stands for Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
Though the 4P’s can help in establishing your digital marketing plan, it’s equally important to take note of the technological resources available. In this section, we listed our favorite tried and tested 10 marketing strategies to increase sales in small businesses:
1. Create Specific Goals and Objectives
It’s much easier to track your progress when you have pre-established goals, objectives, and strategies to hit your targets. When it comes to setting goals, make sure you create goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. It’s important to make sure that every goal and objective you set for your business reflects this SMART acronym.
For example, let’s say your goal is to increase brand awareness, specifically through social media platforms. Your objectives might be to boost audience engagement by 50% and to have your audience share a curated hashtag to highlight your products and services. Now that you have this established, it’s much easier to create a strategy that can work to make sure you achieve your specific goal.
Also, it’s important to document your goals and objectives so you can measure how effective your strategy is. In this way, you can assess whether you need to change or improve your marketing goals.
2. Research Buyer Persona
Are you connecting with your target market? In order to do this, you first need to understand buyer personas. This will allow you to make the best digital marketing strategies that will keep your target audience engaged.
Here’s a couple tips on how to do this:
1. Start by getting quantitative leads and uncover their demographic information whenever possible. These typically include:
- Location: This can be tracked using web analytics tools.
- Age: You can often find this out through analytics tools, or even by sending your leads a survey that includes a question about their age or age range.
- Income or Occupation: Again, you can find this out by sending your leads a survey, but only if they’re comfortable with disclosing this personal information.
2. Next is to gather qualitative leads and psychographic information like the following:
- Interests or Hobbies: What are the popular hobbies within your target market’s location? Does this translate to your business?
- Goals or Aspirations: Learn about the wants of your potential customers. Consumer data can help with this target. A focus group discussion, audience survey, or even an interview with a member of your audience can also help.
- Priorities: Know how your business can help customers with what’s important to them.
- Challenges or Pain Points: What are the potential threats that can deter goal achievement? To better assess, you can ask your sales team or customer service so you can learn how to address these challenges.
3. Evaluate Existing Marketing Strategies
If you’re still using traditional marketing like TV commercials or billboards, you may already have an idea about whether or not these ads are effective for your business. If you use both digital and traditional advertising campaigns, it’s best to gather data from all types of marketing you use in order to determine how to incorporate each type of marketing into your future strategies.
Once you have a breakdown of all your traditional and digital assets, perform an audit on the following for each type of marketing:
- Effectiveness
- Revenue
- ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
- Engagement
- Gaps
When your audit is complete, you need to decide whether or not these assets are a worthy investment for your business.
4. Plan Content Creation
Publishing high-quality content is the key to keeping your customer base engaged. Aside from making content targeting your specific audience, you also need to make content that engages potential clients.
Here are some ways to produce content for your business:
- Blogs, email campaigns, and social media posts are owned content
- Social shares, likes, and comments are earned content
- Affiliate marketing tactics like paid influencers, promoters, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising are paid content
Effective digital marketing strategies typically incorporate a mix of owned, earned, and paid content.
5. Distribution of Content
This strategy involves knowing the right channels for content distribution. Are you thinking about publishing website content? Or maybe trying paid online advertising to help gain website visitors? How about creating landing pages for your products? You could even look into podcasting as a method of distributing content that drives people back to your business.
No matter what methods you choose, it’s important that you take the time to decide what channels you’ll use to distribute your content based on who your target audience is and where they “hang out” online. Also, it’s a good idea to think about improving and optimizing your content on a regular basis to keep it current and updated.
6. Set a Budget
Most businesses set a threshold for their digital marketing budget. It’s always a good idea to plan and execute, but your business could end up in hot water if you don’t plan for expenses properly.
Of course, setting a limitation on your marketing costs is one of the best ways to stay on track with your business expenditures.
7. Keep Track of KPIs
KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are measures to gauge the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns.
The following are some examples of KPIs:
- Conversion rates are the percentage of site visitors turning to sales. If you get 100 visitors in a month with 50 sales, then your conversion rate would be 50 sales divided by 100, or 50%.
- Cost per lead measures the cost of new leads over the total leads acquired. For example, if you spent $100 for a PPC campaign wherein 10 users converted to a lead, then this makes the cost per lead $10. The context here is that if the cost per lead is more than what you expect to earn from each lead, then you need to adjust your expenses or your strategy.
- Returning visitors means that there is engagement on your website or social channels. If there’s high engagement, there’s a higher possibility of sales as well as referrals.
- Clickthrough rates (CTR) in Google Ads translate to the number of ad clicks divided by the number of times your ad is shown, or the ad impression rate. A high CTR almost always translates to a successful digital strategy.
- Customer lifetime value is the total income a client brings to the business overall. If the customer experience and service are good, then the client will likely stay with your business and continue to make purchases over the years.
8. Stay Relevant
One of the most effective ways to stay relevant is to constantly make content for your followers and customers to enhance the user experience. With this in mind, know that your content doesn’t necessarily need to always be about your products or services. You can also offer free content to educate or even to simply entertain your viewers and readers.
9. Rebuild and Refurbish
Even after performing your audit on your current marketing strategies, make sure you’re taking time to consistently look at your strategies as well as the content you’re publishing. Your business will continue to grow if you’re able to continue to rebuild and refurbish your content. Revamping your content on a consistent basis is considered best practice in business, as this can help your rankings on search engines, too. In other words, through rebuilding and refurbishing, your content can rank better in search results and help you gain new customers.
10. Consult Digital Marketers
Admittedly, many small businesses have tried their hand at doing their digital marketing and advertising campaigns by themselves. This is risky because, without an experienced digital marketer, your company’s marketing efforts as well as your marketing budget might be put to waste.
To make sure you stay within your budget and still execute effective strategies, we recommend booking a free consultation with Shelten, LLC.
Shelten, LLC is a brand awareness company that works with B2B and B2C companies for their digital and social media marketing. At Shelten, LLC, we specialize in making sure you get the most out of your content while keeping within your allotted budget. We give you all the help you need to keep you on top of your game!
Conclusion
If you’re looking for help getting discovered online and increasing your sales, don’t hesitate to get in touch with Shelten, LLC. Our team of experienced digital marketers can develop a tailored marketing plan that uses the latest techniques and strategies to increase traffic and conversions for your small business.
With our help, you can take your business to the next level and start seeing real results. Contact us today to learn more!
