All business owners know that there are sales to be made online but achieving these sales in the real world is often a different matter. By implementing these easy marketing tips, you can start getting more sales online while lowering your cost per acquisition.
1) Use your content to educate your customers
It’s easy to fall into the trap of ‘we-ing’ all over your customers in your content, turning every blog, email, and social media post into a tedious, repetitive sales pitch. No one is convinced by this; your prospect will simply switch off or unsubscribe. The role of online content isn’t to ‘push sales’ but to answer questions.
Start by researching the type of questions your target customers are typing into Google. These are a good place to start with your blog posts and addressing these queries will give you a better ranking on Google, too. If you get into the habit of providing valuable, educational content for free on your blog, and through downloadable guides, your prospects will look forward to getting the next email from you, making them more receptive to your sales messages when the time is right.
2) Get to know your customers
Even though the reason you engage in digital marketing is to get more sales for your business, marketing isn’t really about you at all. It’s about your customers and what you can do for them. So, before you spend a penny on marketing or sales, get to know your customers a bit better. In particular, go back to the well and pin down the reasons why there is a market for your product or service at all.
In what ways does your business help your customers, and what problems would your customers face in their daily jobs were you not around? Thinking about this will help you define your core value proposition and the factors that set you apart from your competitors. You may want to formalise this fact-finding mission in one or more buyer personas that describe each of your target customer groups.
3) Make it personal
How many times have you started listening to an advert on the radio, or on YouTube, and switched off (metaphorically or literally) because the content doesn’t speak to you? It’s the same with any online content you choose to publish. The only people who will listen are those to whom it speaks to directly. Generic content doesn’t sell products, whereas personalised content, which strikes a chord with its recipients, is more likely to get results.
So make it personal! In practice, this means tightly defining your content to address very specific aspects of your products and services, and avoiding the temptation to say it all in every blog post. This fits well into email marketing, especially when using an automation platform such as HubSpot or MailChimp. You can break down your audience into multiple segments and niches, and create content flows for each of them, addressing the specific factors that attracts each type of person to your business.
4) Listen to your data
Data analytics is arguably the most important development in digital marketing over the past 20 years. It’s not essential, of course. There’s nothing to stop you sending emails and publishing blogs without monitoring your click rate, bounce rates, open rates, and other factors, but by taking this path you miss out on valuable insight into how popular (or not) your marketing content is. Monitoring your data for every email, blog, and paid advert lets you see what works and what doesn’t, what your most popular blog posts are, and which efforts simply fall flat. This isn’t just an interest exercise. Data analytics saves you time and money by allowing you to focus on the most popular and relevant types of content, so you get more sales and spend less time and money acquiring them.
5) Be original
Google’s robots hate duplicated content, which is why you should never plagiarise someone else’s material or even reuse your own content on multiple platforms. But there is more to originality than not copying and pasting. Most online marketing content on any topic is crushingly similar, so original insights stand out a mile, in a good way. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel in your marketing. Your customers, after all, will all have a very similar range of human problems and purchase motivations. However, investing in original research and creative insights will make your company that bit more memorable, that bit more authoritative, which can make all the difference when closing a deal.
6) Keep active
Once you embark on the path of online marketing, stick at it. Nothing looks worse in the eyes of a customer than a social media profile or blog that suddenly trails off or is only updated sporadically. Seeing this makes people wonder what happened to the business, whether they are still trading, or if they take online marketing seriously. It certainly doesn’t paint a picture of a credible supplier, or of a market leader.
Establish a publication schedule for each of your chosen marketing strategies, that is appropriate to the needs of your buyers, and stick with it. Using automation software can help you keep on top of the manual elements of this, and working with a good content marketing or sales development agency can help you produce continually fresh and relevant content without tying up your own team.
Find out more
Getting more sales online isn’t always so much about what you do but how you go about it. Many businesses dip into this or that digital marketing tactic and come out disappointed because they haven’t applied the tools or methods in a strategic way, or haven’t listened to the data for ways they can improve. So, they throw money away on inefficient practices or by chasing the wrong buyers.
By understanding your target market, personalising your content, and continually monitoring and reviewing your data for the most efficient and cost-effective strategies, you can increase your sales online without requiring a huge marketing budget. To find out more, please get in touch with one of our marketing team today for an initial chat and a free marketing assessment.
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