Sales…the end all be all of marketing. If no sales are happening then it can be said that the marketing strategy and tactics are not working. However, as time passes, people are becoming more and more likely to not listen to salesmen and traditional marketing pitches.
When you hear information like “on average, only one appointment is created by a salesman from 209 cold calls” it makes you stop and think about it. Why is making sales so difficult?
Well, the thing is that people are always changing, and there is no “blueprint” for success. Be that as it may, we will still teach you some effective marketing approaches that have a high chance of success. Hopefully, they will help you improve your sales.
5 Sales Enhancing Marketing Approaches
1) Behavioral Targeting
This marketing tactic involves researching your audience and then tailoring your approach according to that data to get the best response. So, why does behavioral targeting work? The reason is that people want to be heard instead of being talked to. According to a survey, 69% of buyers say that they want the sales representative to listen to their needs.
Now, if you have done your research and collected data on your prospects through both your own and third-party platforms, this becomes much easier. In behavioral targeting, you need to analyze and understand what the prospect wants or needs by looking at what kind of items/services they have shown interest in or have not noticed at all.
Once you have that information, then you can simply use it with your outbound marketing techniques such as emails and calls to entice that prospect into making a sale.
There are a lot of ways in which you can segment your target market in order to meet their needs. For example, you can segmentize your market by age group and by gender. This sort of classification makes it easy for you to understand how you have to approach each group and what you have to do in order to make your offerings look appealing to them.
Do:
- Make the prospect feel that you understand their needs;
- Suggest products and services that deal with their pain points.
Do not:
- Use so much information about the prospect that they feel creeped out.
Elaborating a bit on the “Do Not” part, a good way to be transparent about your data collection policies is to simply explain them on your website/webpage. For example, if you use some of your user’s data for providing them with a personalized experience, you should make it clear what sort of data you use and what sort of data you don’t.
Being transparent like this helps you to build trust with your users and it lessens the qualms they have with sharing their information with you.
2) Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing refers to using tactics that let people who are interested in your brand, find it and interact with it. Inbound marketing is useful nowadays because people are not fond of listening to salesmen and sales talk. Instead, they prefer to do their research and make a purchase after that.
Approximately 81% of retail shoppers do their own research online before they commit to a purchase. That overwhelming figure should tell you why inbound marketing is so successful.
One of the most effective inbound marketing techniques is to create and spread educative content on digital channels. This is followed by SEO so that it becomes easier for your prospects to find your content and educate themselves/conduct research.
This is where quality, readable, and easy-to-understand content is required for brand and trust building. So, here are some Dos and Don’ts of inbound marketing that you should take care of.
Do:
- Write easy-to-read content;
- Write informative and useful content.
Do not:
- Using plagiarized or copied content.
From these dos and don’ts, it is obvious that the content needs to be readable, unique, and useful to be effective. As a marketer, if you are facing difficulties in writing easy-to-read content and unique content for marketing, take help from online paraphrasing tools. For this, the below tools can be helpful for different purposes:
- Paraphraser.io – Best for enhancing content readability
- Wordtune.com – Best for improving the quality of sentences
Mind you, there are a lot of other tools that you can use for these purposes. The reason that we’ve mentioned paraphrasing tools is that since they work on provided inputs that are created by the user themselves, there isn’t a lot that they can go wrong with when presenting the results.
This is something that can be better understood in contrast to AI generators. Since AI generators create the entire content themselves, they can go a little wrong with the context as well as the information they include.
By the way, since we did branch out on this whole thing from the topic of SEO, we think it’s a little suitable to mention why exactly readability and engagement is necessary for it.
Search engines, Google in particular, aim at providing their users with valuable information that can help them out. Keeping this in consideration, they (the search engines) favor the content that is made to provide solutions to readers. Similarly, search engines de-rank content that is full of fluff and serves no real purpose for the reader.
This is evaluated, among others, by metrics such as the bounce rate and dwell time. And this is where we make the connection between engaging content and SEO.
If your content happens to be engaging and interesting, your readers will naturally spend more time on the site. They will also interact with the other pages and elements on the website, which will decrease the bounce rate and increase the dwell time.
3) Offer Free Trials
If your brand is a service provider of some sort, then you should try to offer free trials. There are so many things people can do to research a service. However, nothing beats hands-on experience.
Let’s assume you provide a software service such as an online app for designing something. If you provide a free trial of the online app which lets people use and experiment with it, then more people will actually buy it. Now, the thing is, free trials can easily shoot you in the foot as well.
If the trial is too extensive, i.e., it provides all major features for a long time, then people have no reason to buy it. They will create a fake account every time they want to use the online app to access its trial version. So, striking a good balance is key here.
Do:
- Offer a free trial;
- Provide most of the useful features;
- Make it time-limited.
Do not:
- Make the trial period too long;
- Offering all the features;
- Badger the user over and over about buying it.
Another trick of the trade when it comes to offering limited trials for your services is putting an IP lock on the users. This basically involves barring a user from using the same IP to create multiple profiles and using them for getting the features and benefits.
As we said earlier, you have to strike a good balance. If you’re too tight with the restrictions, you could end up putting the users off. On the other hand, if you’re too free with them, you could end up ruining the hype of the whole thing.
If we want to talk about SAAS offerings, there is another way in which you can provide your users with a sneak peek of your whole product but without making it (the sneak peek) too liberal. You can simply create a menu on your website’s home page that gives a walk-through of your tool/application and shows all the features. You can also give the users the option to try it out once using an input of their choice.
The benefit of this type of “trial” is that you don’t have to worry about putting an IP lock or an account restriction on the users. Since the trial itself is short and brief, you can leave it to anyone to use as many times as they want.
4) Offer Special Deals to Secure Sales
This is actually a tip about following up on prospects. Following up is literally the most important part of salesmanship. According to Invespro, 60% of sales require at least four follow-ups, as people tend to say “no” four times.
By following up and offering special deals only for them, you can guarantee some modicum of success and ensure that your sale is made.
This also works for online shopping. You can follow up on abandoned carts and offer some discounts which can entice the user to actually buy everything in that cart.
Do:
- Be polite;
- Be consistent;
- Offer a good deal.
Do not:
- Be impolite;
- Make the prospect feel rushed;
- Be brash and aggressive.
Let’s actually elaborate on the thing we just mentioned above.
When it comes to online shopping, you can set up your website to automatically recognize the users who filled out the sign-up or checking-out form and then abandoned them.
Then, you can simply send an email to the customer informing them about their abandoned goods. This can also bring back a customer and have them complete their purchase.
You can also try and combine this trick with discounts and sales. For example, if you notice that a group of buyers has abandoned a particular product, you can send them a follow-up mail informing them of a sale or discount (on the concerned product).
This sort of action can prompt them to come back and complete the purchase.
5) Nurture and Reward Loyal Customers
In marketing, loyal and returning customers are very welcome. However, you may be thinking to yourself, “what does nurturing loyal customers have to do with marketing?”
Well, the answer is that loyal customers are really effective brand ambassadors. You will definitely change your mind about this approach when you learn that 82% of Americans seek referrals when thinking about making a purchase.
And who do you think makes these referrals? Loyal and regular customers. People only refer those brands to others whom they use themselves and are happy with. So, do not neglect your regulars. And provide them incentives for:
- Being a regular i.e., with a rewards program or something
- For referring your brand and give them either discounts or monetary compensation for each successful referral.
This way you will be able to improve the number of sales you make.
Do:
- Nurture more regulars;
- Incentivize people to keep buying from you.
Do not:
- Be brash and aggressive;
- Neglect your regulars.
Another thing that you can try doing in order to nurture your existing leads and customers is to compensate them for any shortcomings that they may face from your product or service.
For example, if a particular customer has their order canceled due to some issue at your end, you can give them a special voucher or discount to make up for it.
Even if you don’t want to give some sort of monetary compensation for shortcomings on your end, you can still own up to it and send an apologetic message to the lead. That way, you’ll come off as a responsible brand and you won’t be as likely to stop the leads from coming back for another purchase.
Conclusion
And those are five useful sales-enhancing approaches that you can try and incorporate into your own marketing strategy. As we stated before, not all methods work for everyone.
What worked for one brand may not work for you. However, all of these approaches are really helpful and will provide you with some success if applied correctly.
Another golden piece of advice that we can give to you regarding these marketing approaches is not to be disheartened if the results don’t show up as you planned. Everything takes time, and having a little patience in the face of unfavorable outcomes can pave the way to lasting success. That was a little poetic, but it’s true.
