Your product is stellar. Your service is impeccable. Your supply chain and logistical procedures are sturdy as stone.
All too often, businesses are ready to handle more customers but aren’t entirely sure how to go about getting them. You probably know you need to market your work, but you’re likely unsure of what marketing strategy would work best for your business.
Maybe you’ve even tried a few different marketing approaches and been underwhelmed by your return on investment. The following will look at a few key components of choosing the right marketing strategy for you.
Identify Your Current Sources Of Sales
Before deciding what marketing strategy suits you, you need to figure out where your current clients are coming from. This involves completing a scoping review of all your existing marketing and points of contact with potential consumers. You may quickly realize that a lot of your traffic comes from random blogs you hadn’t even known were writing about you.
You might figure out that many of your customers use a particular app you’re unfamiliar with where your product is spoken about. A solid increase in sales is possible if you can figure out what works for you and do more of that. Your current customers can teach you a ton about your future customers if you let them.
Figure Out When People Leave Your Funnel
Your sales funnel is the process through which someone travels from someone who knows nothing about your work to someone who is making a repeated purchase. It’s vital that you take a look at the current state of your sales funnel and study what people are doing within it before choosing your marketing strategy.
If you find lots of people are watching your Instagram stories but moving on to different accounts without having clicked any of the links, your marketing strategy needs to target this stage of your funnel, trying new approaches to keeping those viewers engaged and linking your stories with the decision to click provided links. If you notice people often get right up to the checkout and then suddenly abandon their carts, never to return, your marketing strategy needs to address this stage of the purchasing decision.
Figure out where your sales funnel is leaking customers, and then use marketing to patch the holes. This might mean addressing customer concerns with high-quality sales copy on your website. It might mean adjusting your prices to reflect how many people immediately click out when they see what you charge.
It might mean providing visitors to your site with strong video testimonials right before that “checkout” button appears. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to addressing sales funnel weaknesses, so this is one of the hardest steps to complete if you’re designing a marketing strategy. It’s important; don’t skip it and focus solely on easier steps.
Balance What’s Working And What Isn’t
Your marketing strategy needs to do two things. First, it needs to expand upon what you learned in step one; there are places either online or in the analog world where people who like your product tend to hang out. Market in these places.
You already know this works, so why not capitalize on it? Second, your strategy needs to address your sales funnel failings to help keep people within your funnel once you get them interested in that initial click.
Avoid Must-Act-Now Strategies
It’s easy to get inspired by trending hashtags or moments in digital history, and it can be fun to take advantage of them when they come around, but you need to understand something vital: if you have to act right this second in order to gain from an opportunity that is going to collapse at any moment, this is not a marketing strategy.
It’s not going to provide any growth long-term nor help establish your business as a fierce competitor in your niche. It’ll be gone just as quickly as it arose. At most, these surges can give you a few extra sales for a day or week. They almost never dramatically change the course of your business’s development.
Does It Convert Into Sales?
This is a quintessential aspect of selecting the right marketing strategy for your business. It’s really easy to get pulled toward victories and metrics that don’t result in actual sales. Does it matter if you have 40,000 new followers on your social media page if none of them buy anything? Not really.
Be extremely careful about snazzy marketing claims and vibrant projects that make you feel like your business is reaching new clients but don’t actually improve your conversion rate. Always come back to whether something is actually effective or not when analyzing marketing efforts.
Marketing strategies can be complicated, but they don’t have to be. Studying your business and making changes to your efforts based on the results you get can produce some highly lucrative marketing endeavors. It’s a good idea not to try too many things at once as it can be had to figure out what is producing a positive effect and what’s hampering your growth efforts.
