7 Effective Marketing Tactics To Increase Sales
by Mike Khorev
For most marketers and organizations, the most common goal for their marketing activities is to drive more sales.
Yet, surprisingly many marketing tactics and strategies are not aligned well with that goal. Many marketers assume that all “common” marketing activities, when done right, will in the end produce sales. While there’s some truth to that statement, there are certain tactics that can drive conversions better than others.
In this guide. we will share seven of those tactics, and by the end of this guide, you will be able to develop a marketing strategy that is more effective in generating more sales.
Let us begin with the first one.
It’s All About Value Proposition
Here’s the catch: your customers aren’t exactly buying your product or service, but rather the benefits they get after the purchase. So, value proposition, which is communicating the value of your products to your prospects is the key to your conversion success.
In its essence, value proposition is a statement that:
- Clarifies specific benefits of your products or services (quantifiable value)
- Explaining how your product and/or service can solve the current problems of your customers or improve their current situation (relevancy)
- Persuade the customers to purchase your product/service and not from your competitors by communicating your unique values (unique differentiation)
Your value proposition should be visible especially on your home page, ideally to be the first thing the visitors see. Also, it should be clearly visible in all major entry points of your website without being too hard selling.
Remember, however, that value proposition is not a catch phrase or a slogan like “the world’s #1 golf ball”. It can be a part of the whole value proposition, but not all of it. While there can be many different formats, value proposition is usually presented with a combination of text (a headline, subheadline, and a paragraph) and a visual.
Here is the basic format of value proposition:
- Headline: This can be your slogan or catchphrase, and should be your attention grabber. You can simply mention the product, the customer, and the key benefit.
- Sub-headline: A clear explanation of what you offer, your target customer, and why the product/service can be useful. If the product/service addresses any specific problem, you can also mention it.
- Body: Can be in the form of bullet points listing the key features of the product/service, or a simple paragraph.
- Visual:They say pictures speak louder than words. You can show the photo of your product, an image highlighting your core messages, or even an infographic.
Remember that clarity and visibility are the keys to a successful value proposition. Check out this article by WordStream for a few excellent examples on value proposition.
Targeting The Right Customers
This is seemingly obvious, but you will be surprised how so many marketers fail (or worse, didn’t try) to understand their ideal customers. The strategic choice of your primary customer, with a strong emphasis on the word “primary”, defines your business. Why? Your business should always aim to please this primary customer through all your activities.
Amazon have several group of customers: consumers, content providers, sellers, and business. Yet, their evolution over the years was based on their primary customers: the consumers, so now we have things like the detailed product reviews and consumer-generated reviews, free prime shipping and so on. One of the reasons why Google overtook Yahoo! and other early search engines is the fact that they targeted their customers well: the technology-affluent people and so their newer features are technology-focused like Android, Maps, and others.
The bottom line: find your ideal customers, and utilize your resources to please them. How to do this? Develop a buyer persona as an ideal model of your customer. After that, do an extensive research on their behavior, needs, problems, and values. You can now develop a comprehensive strategy to allocate your resources for this specific target customer.
Content Marketing
While people generally won’t make a purchase directly after reading a content, there are many benefits in properly utilizing content marketing for conversion purposes. First, people are more likely to buy from the brands/companies they can trust, and consistently publishing relevant, high-quality content is one of the best ways to establish credibility.
Next, content marketing can effectively educate your customers about your product benefits, and how your product differs from your competitors’. Last but not least, content marketing is far more affordable compared to other marketing channels like advertising or paid social.
How to use content marketing effectively? To start, your content must be visible to your audience. The best way to achieve this is by utilizing SEO to allow your content to rank higher on Google search results. While SEO can be quite complicated on its own right, here are the key steps you can do:
- Use keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SEMRush among others to find keywords that are related to your brand/product and have enough search volume.
- Do a Google search on those keywords, and see how the top-ranking content pieces are doing. This way, you can get a clearer picture of what kind of content(s) to develop.
- Plan topic(s) to target the keyword(s) you’ve found on the previous step. Keep in mind that your content pieces should first and foremost, be valuable for human readers.
- Develop your content and publish it, yet your work doesn’t end here.
- Treat your content pieces as landing pages and start your link building efforts. Build relationships with influencers and/or high-authority sites of your industry, and ask them to link to your content.
Besides SEO, you can use social media marketing (paid and organic), influencer marketing, and paid advertising to promote your content. So, remember that there are two aspects to effective content marketing: consistently developing high-quality content pieces, and promoting them.
Collecting User Feedback
In the end, the customers are the ones buying your product/service, and so their (honest) feedback is extremely valuable. Sometimes, we see our own product with a tunnel vision, and it is quite often we didn’t realize our mistakes, or any flaws in our product before our customers did.
Yet, gathering honest customer feedback can be difficult, especially if you haven’t implemented the necessary tools to do it, and especially to automate the process.
In general, you get customer feedbacks from surveys, email (through “contact us” page, etc), in-person interactions, social media interactions, and reviews among others. So, how can we get more feedbacks from these channels? One of the most effective ways is by offering incentives in various forms, and automate the process of giving offers/asking questions.
Ask them what they liked and especially what they didn’t like from your product/service, talk about the sales process: the number of steps they took and the difficulties they faced. Ask them where they learned about you, and what part about your company caught their attention.
Also, keep in mind that your customer’s needs and perceptions are always evolving. So, keep asking for more and more feedbacks. Check out this guide by Moz on how to get more customer feedback effectively.
Events
Even in this advanced digital age where most of things are online, offline events are still very effective in boosting your sales, simply because events allow you to show your physical presence and also enables you to engage your customers in-person.
Your events shouldn’t necessarily be overly complicated, and the idea is to present your customers with the things they love. So, go back again to customer and demographic research, and figure out their hobbies, interests, and values. For example, if you found out that the majority of your customers love football, consider hosting an event where your customers can watch a game together, probably with a Super Bowl ticket as a door prize.
In short, event marketing is an effective way to keep your brand at the top of your customer’s mind. Still not convinced? These statistics compilation by Bizzabo lists some interesting marketing facts about event marketing performance. Some notable ones are:
- 63% of marketers plan on investing more in live events, both in number of events and budget-wise
- 80% of marketers believe that offline events are critical to their success
- 80% of C-Suite executives plan to invest more in live events in the future
- 75% of marketers believe that live events will become increasingly important in the upcoming years
Video Content
Video as a content medium has seen an enormous rise in popularity in the past few years. Yet, although there can be many reasons to implement video content on your site, the biggest reason is arguably the fact that it is very effective in encouraging purchase. Studies even suggested that having a video on a landing page can help increase purchase conversions by more than 80%.
So, how can we use video to drive more conversions? Here are a few ideas:
- As a general rule of thumb, put your lead capture form in the first 10% or 20% of your video
- A video tutorial highlighting the key features of your product/service is always effective, as well as behind-the-scenes content like the making of your product or a showcase of your team
- Use an interesting thumbnail. In general, a thumbnail showing a human is better
- Make your video short and comprehensive, or at least if it’s relatively long, hook your audience with an immediately entertaining section upfront. In general, you will need to capture the audience’s attention within the first minute
- If resources allow, send personalized video to your prospects. Personalization and human touches are extremely effective in driving conversions
Upsell and Cross Sell
Getting the actual sales is arguably the hardest aspect not only of your marketing activities, but also for the overall business in general. So, with each sales, we will need to attempt to maximize revenue and profit through upselling and cross-selling.
Upselling, in essence is offering the better version of the product itself for a higher price. It is especially common for software and digital products, where we can offer the “premium” version with better features. Cross-selling, on the other hand, is offering other related products and/or services, preferably the ones that can complement the first product/service.
While upselling and cross selling are more common in some businesses than others, they can easily be applied to virtually any business, and are very effective in improving the bottom line of the funnel. Also, upselling and cross selling can indirectly maintain your customer retention. Check out this guide by Marketo for more upsell and cross sell strategies.
End Words
These seven marketing tactics to increase purchase conversions are by no means the only available ones. Yet, they are by far some of the most effective in capturing prospects’ attention and generate more revenue from each of them.
Keep in mind that each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages, and you might need to hire a marketing consultant to gain more success.
Also, it is a common occurrence that your sales results aren’t maximized because your website is not optimized enough for conversions.
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