Marketing and sales happen to be the buzzwords without which no business can survive. A well-crafted strategy for marketing and sales happen to be the most essential prerequisite for business growth.
So What is Sales and Marketing ?
Sales involve the direct one-to-one interactions, precisely those interpersonal relations that directly earn revenue. Networking, telephone calls and the meetings are all part of the process of sales.
Marketing on the other hand, involves all the actions that a business takes to recruit the prospects. The examples include advertising, direct mail campaigns television, public relations etc.
The direct sales marketing embodies a variety of strategies. Research suggests that between 3-12 touch points have to be met for any prospect to convert to a sale.
As purchasers are often getting saturated these days by the marketing gimmicks, it has become even more complicated and challenging for businesses to entice audience. They must dig out innovative ways for targeting the audience.
To help you out, here are some of the marketing tips that will assist in growing your business. Take a look.
- Research and Get to Know Your Target Audience and Industry – In order to make your goods or service appealing, one has to have a good sense of the target audience. For that, ask the relevant questions like –
- How does your product or service make people’s lives easier?
- What challenges does your service/product solve?
- How does the product or service add value?
With these questions you can get a clearer picture of the target audience and really understand your ideal customer base. But just knowing them is not enough, you have to know them inside out and the analysis and research of your market will help to profile the customers. This will help you create both the contents as well as the products with them in mind. You should also try and understand the competitors. The strategic approach to the analysis of the competitors is vital for the business. Their strength is something upon which you can build on and their weakness is somewhere through which you can show how you are better. All these can become your strategy and plan of execution and help you promote what you offer in the right way.
- Build Content Intelligently and Cost-effectively – You cannot leave the business website dormant expecting customers to find out magically. Content marketing is said to be the most effective form of tactic for SEO. It is seen that companies that blog 15 or more times enjoy 4 times more leads than those who do that less than 5 times a month. The contents that assist customers solve their problems or reach their goals are the most popular ones. Contents on the internet can go stale just within a few weeks. You should try and keep the contents relevant and evergreen as much as possible. So have a skilled content writer in the team or hire a competent freelancer.
- Go Social – Just like content marketing and SEO, social media also presents a strong marketing opportunity. You can get profuse exposure through social media and that is why more and more businesses are tapping on its popularity today. Here are some facts –
- Over 500 million monthly users are recorded by Instagram
- Over 70% of the adult users on the internet use Facebook
- Over 450 million use LinkedIn with over 25% being active on it every month
- Build and Strengthen Your Networking and Partnerships – Your connections and networks can turn out to be the biggest resources and support for your business at the times of needs. Not just valuable advice at your hour of distress but you may also find complementary elements of your businesses or practices that can lead to some form of collaborations through these. Networking can be an old practice, but still a lot can be achieved by approaching people face-to face. The growth of social media has enabled you to advertise about your trade shows, conferences and events from much before. This is going to help you with not just pulling the crowd and warming up the prospective leads but also with event management as you can get some idea who are going to attend and what is the general expectation and arrange things accordingly which raises the probability of event success manifolds.
- Acknowledge Your Customers and Offer Rewards – Customers are the kings for any business and they are also parts of your sales department if you can deal with them in the right way. Positive word-of mouth testimonials and brand advocators are the best thing that you can get for the brand image building and sales of your business. So reward your customers as much as possible. Provide incredible customer support, competitive pricing and freebies so that they have a reason to come back to your store and also recommended it to others time and again.
These are just some of the things that you should keep in mind which are shared by the experts. These will help your business create its own niche in the industry and also keep it growing and attracting more conversions over the years.