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.

The post 7 Effective Marketing Tactics To Increase Sales appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Back in the days, the term “marketing” usually refers to buying advertising space in magazines, newspapers, TV spots, or billboards, or buying email and phone number lists to broadcast our promotional messages. 

However, these  “traditional” marketing activities are no longer effective today, thanks to various reasons such as:

• Resistance to intrusive marketing, especially by younger people
• Various forms of ad blocker, even by Google itself,  rendering online advertising ineffective
• People care for social proofs like online reviews and peer recommendations more, no matter how good your advertising is
• Advertising cost is rapidly increasing, even when your advertising is effective, it’s hard to ensure a positive ROI

Those are just some examples of many other reasons. So, is marketing dead? Not exactly, but we can no longer rely on traditional marketing. This is where inbound marketing fills the gap, as we will learn together below.

So, What Actually Is Inbound Marketing?

The traditional marketing practices we have just discussed above is now often deemed “outbound” marketing practices, because they share one characteristic: you are sending your promotional messages “out” to your audience. So, you are pushing your messages outward, which is often, interruptive and intrusive.

On the other hand, inbound marketing focuses on pulling your ideal audience “in”, which is mainly achieved in three key concepts:

• Visible Content: publishing relevant and valuable content pieces which are visible and searchable, mainly by optimizing these content pieces for search engine rankings and social media presence.
• Consistency: trust is a very expensive asset, and yet very easy to lose. By consistently publishing high-quality content pieces, we can establish our position as the expert of our respective industries. 
• Personalization: each audience might need different content pieces according to their needs, their current stage on the buyer’s journey, and other factors. The idea is to deliver the right content for the right audience at exactly the right time to encourage them to move forward, closer to the actual purchase. 

To summarize, inbound marketing is simply understanding the needs and issues of your ideal audience, publishing a content so this audience can find it when looking for information, and educating this audience until they are convinced to buy your product/service.

How Inbound Marketing Works

Inbound marketing might seem like a complex idea at first glance, however, it is actually quite simple once you’ve got the hang of it. 

Here, we will discuss how to execute inbound marketing in a step-by-step approach, beginning with the first one.

Step 1: Setting Your Goals

The first step of a sound inbound marketing strategy is defining your goal(s). There are two main principles to consider here: first, is that your goals should be clear in a way that they are measurable through KPIs and measuring the right metrics. Second, they have to be realistic. 

Big goals can certainly have their advantages, but can backfire when you (and your team) feel like you can’t achieve anything. In this case, you might want to break down the big goals into smaller, realistic milestones. Here are some important considerations in this step:

• Evaluate your current state (i.e. your current website traffic, your current number of generated leads, and so on)
• Your inbound marketing  goal(s) must align with the overall business goal. For example, if your business goal is to increase revenue by 20%, this can translate to an inbound marketing goal of increasing prospects generation by 50%.
• Your goals must be measurable. Define important KPIs and set up the right tracking system to track these goals. We will discuss this further below. 
• Have a timeline. This way, your efforts will have a time-bound purpose, and you can continuously evaluate them 

Step 2: Understanding Your Audience

An integral part of inbound marketing is a thorough understanding of your audience: their behaviors, their needs, the problems they are facing, and so on. The idea is so that we can develop the right content that can provide value for this audience.

First, choose the ideal audience according to your goals defined on step 1. Here are some approaches you can try:

• If you are starting from scratch (i.e., it’s a brand new business or site), you can start by developing a reader persona. Developing a reader persona, however, can be beneficial for any business stages.
• Utilize your available data. For example, you can analyze the demographic data of your current social media followers and your website traffic. Use this data to find your most ideal audience
• Research your competitors, their inbound marketing approaches and especially their audience. You can either target this same audience or find opportunities and gaps based on this data.
• If you are a B2B company, remember that there can be several different purchase decision makers in your target company, that can comprise of several different roles. You will need to create different reader personas for each of these roles.

Step 3: Keyword Research

Based on your audience’s needs, we can find out how this audience is searching for content pieces by conducting a keyword research. There are four important factors to consider in this step:

1. Figure out your audience’s search intent

When we are searching on the internet, there is always a deeper search intent behind it. The thing is, our keyword and thus our content should accommodate this specific intent to provide value. Let’s use an example to illustrate this. Assume we are a B2B company selling a marketing automation tool, and here are some common intents for this company’s audience:

• Navigational: the audience heard about your brand from a colleague, online reviews, or other sources, and so are directly searching for your brand name. For this intent, you should optimize for branded keywords. 

• Informational: the audience is searching for information related to their needs or problems. For example, an audience might be searching for an answer to their marketing productivity issue. In this case, you can target keywords like “marketing productivity”, “marketing automation productivity”, and so on.

• Product research: here, the audience is already interested in buying a marketing automation tool, and is currently comparing different products including yours. Here, you can target keywords like “your competitor’s name VS your brand name”.

Understanding your audience’s intent will also help in the content development process, and so this is a very beneficial approach for any inbound marketing strategy.

2. Utilizing Available Tools

Fortunately, there are many available tools that can help us in this process. Some of them are:

• Google Adwords’ Keyword Planner Tool
• SEMRush
• Ahrefs

You can also use tools like Ubersuggest and BuzzSumo to suggest keywords and topics, among others. There are two important metrics to focus on when using these tools:

1. Search Volume

Refers to how many times people actually search for this keyword, usually on a monthly basis. No matter how relevant you perceive a keyword for your business, there’s no value in focusing on this keyword if no one is actually searching for it. 

The “proper” search volume will be largely dependent on your industry, but generally, a search volume of above 500/month is considered decent.

2. Keyword Difficulty

Keyword Difficulty (KD) is closely related to the number of competitors you will face for a specific keyword: the more competition, the more “difficult” to optimize for the keyword. Tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs can show KD as a percentage, based on their algorithms. You might also want to check out this guide by Ahrefs to further help with the subject.

In general, the higher the search volume is (hence, the more popular the keyword), the tougher the keyword difficulty. The key here is finding the right keywords with the right balance of a decent search volume and manageable competition. 

3. Manual Approach

The thing is, we can’t always rely on digital tools when researching keywords and topics. Sometimes, we have to rely on our human creativity. 

For example, if you are targeting the boxing niche, most keyword research and suggestion tools won’t be able to come up with keywords like “southpaw”, which can be relevant. Similarly, if your main niche is basketball, most tools won’t come up with the “slam dunk” keyword.

Based on the other approaches we have discussed above, use your own creativity to fill in the gaps. You can then validate your keyword by using the keyword research tools above.

Step 4: Content Development

Now that you’ve decided on your target keywords, it’s time to develop your content. Here are the key considerations for this step:

1. Developing a Content Calendar

You can expand each target keyword into several (in fact, many different topics). So, it is wise to plan all these topics ahead and develop a comprehensive content calendar. 

A proper content calendar should list at least: 

• When and where (the channel) you will distribute the content. The channel will also often dictate the form of the content 
• The tentative title of the content (optimized for the target keywords)
• Target keywords
• Meta description, meta tags, and categories
• CTA (Call-to-Action) plan
• Development progress
• How you will promote the content

Ideally, you should prepare a 12-month editorial calendar.

2. Developing Your Content

While content development is a very broad subject on its own, and we won’t give it much justice here, here are some key principles to follow:

1. SEO Optimization VS Value

Working with SEo experts on optimizing for SEO is a very important aspect of inbound marketing. However, make sure to focus on providing value and uniqueness for your human audience. Include your keywords naturally and don’t overstuff your content with keywords.

2. Content Length

The longer your content is always the better, especially for SEO purposes. However, it will be harder to maintain quality and engagement, the longer your content goes. The key here is finding the right balance, and according to studies, the average length for top-ranking textual content pieces is 1,890 words. What about podcasts and videos? This guide can be a good place to start. 

3. Media Diversification

Even if you are posting a textual content, you should use images and videos to enhance it. On the other hand, you can use textual blog posts to support videos and podcasts. For example, you can publish relatively short and engaging videos and podcasts, and then provide a link to a more in-depth textual content.

4. Use Various Forms

There are many different content forms available:

• Educational and informational content
• Behind-the-scenes content
• Images, infographics, and photos
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Premium downloadable content like a report, white paper, or an ebook

The idea is to go back to your audience’s intent, and publish a content form that will provide better value for that specific intent. This way, we can encourage the audience to move forward in their buyer’s journey.

Step 5: Content Promotion

No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring value unless someone is actually consuming it. So, content promotion is just as important as the development process, if not even more important. 

There are various channels you can use here:

• SEO: As we have mentioned, SEO is an integral part of inbound marketing. You might want to check out this guide to further learn about SEO optimization.

• Social Media Marketing: With so many people using social media, obviously social media marketing, both organic and paid, can be effective.

• Influencer Marketing: There are two core benefits in using influencers to promote your marketing. First, you can effectively reach their audience. Second, you might get valuable backlinks for SEO purposes.

Obviously, there are many other tactics you can use, and you might want to check out this guide by Moz about content promotion.

The idea is, treat your content as a landing page: optimize for the right keywords, build backlinks, and use all the possible tactics to promote each content.

End Words 

While inbound marketing is certainly a pretty deep subject, the tactics and principles we have shared above can be an excellent foundation for any inbound marketing strategy.

 Remember, however, that the key here is consistency: you will need to consistently publish high-quality, relevant content to continuously generate inbound leads in the long run. 

The post Why Inbound Marketing is the ONLY Marketing appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Offline marketing, they say, the flyers, the adverts in magazines and newspaper, the business cards, self-adhesive vinyl prints, roller banners and all that kind of stuff, is long gone. But these ‘defunct’ marketing tools still back a punch. If not, why has spending on offline marketing seemingly stayed the same over the last three years?

Ignoring offline marketing is to ignore a whole raft of opportunities to connect with new customers and followers. But how does offline marketing win you more business? What is it that gives your brand a magic boost? Is it magic or a fantastic strategic move?

1. The right image

Image. Impressions. Familiarity. Brand. Four words that big brands know how to connect into a coherent sentence. Does your brand know how to do that?

Social media is a fast-paced, relentless kind of place where you have to stay one step ahead of ‘current’ and be the future.

With offline marketing, you can craft high-resolution print campaigns that you can re-use many times. Plus, there is something pleasant about the tactile nature of offline adverts and marketing. It has more permanence and more power than your brand going viral online for all the wrong reasons…

2. Direct mail Vs. email

Dare we utter the dreaded four letters – G.D.P.R. – and get out alive? The new rulebook relating to the online processing and management of customer data comes into force on 25th May 2018.

How, when and why you re-use customer contact information digitally could be a minefield, earning you a fine should you share or use it in the wrong way. Tread cautiously until you fully understand the new rules.

Direct mail, on the other hand, is less intrusive. An Australian Post piece of research found that 72% of Australians preferred mail over email when it comes to a marketing campaign from businesses.

Clearly, a survey relating to postal campaigns by a postal carrier should raise questions about who the respondents were, but it seems that the sentiment echoed is one that is true for most countries.

Get it right, and the piece of direct mail could be the powerful tool that brings people to your door.

3. Aid the purchasing decision

How consumers decide to buy from a brand is simple and yet complex. It is an emotional decision and we all know that there are many internal and external factors that affect the emotions on a daily basis.

But when it comes to buying a product or service, there is one thing that is clear: when a customer understands your product, they are more likely to purchase.

For some brands, including those new to the market and those who have been around for some time, it may be that offline marketing is the tool to use to educate potential customers about you, your product or service.

4. Target a specific customer demographic

You know who your customers are – here’s why customer persona is important – and thus you may find from your research that one way your customers like to be reached is through an offline marketing tool.

But it isn’t really a case of choosing online OR offline because both have their uses and their successes (and failures).

5. Link to your online world

Who said that on offline marketing tools you can’t invite people into your online world?

Why can’t you suggest they take a look at your Facebook page or join you over on Instagram? Why not share their enjoyment of your product with a well-timed tweet and hashtag over on Twitter?

6. Measurable

There are some who say that offline marketing is not as powerful as we think, probably because the hard facts and statistics for being able to measure offline marketing are relatively minimal.

What this means, that to understand how effective offline marketing campaigns are, you need to choose ways of attempting to track if your flyers are working, or your posters are attracting attention.

Measuring is important. But then there is the subtlety behind offline marketing tools that makes them what they are. The arty posters of high street fashion retailers, for example, may not lead to floods of people into their store but it retains their brand and image in the public domain.

And that is priceless.

Driven by strategy

Offline marketing campaigns need to be driven by a clear strategy and aimed at your customers demographic, in the right place at the right times and with a link to your online world. Can you manage that?

Colour Graphics has over 20 years’ experience in helping their commercial clients create offline marketing tools that have been successful time and time again.

The post How Print Marketing Can Win You More Business appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.