The single most important metric for measuring marketing success is sales. And that’s not surprising.
Even though marketing can be used to increase brand awareness, nurture relationships, and expand into new markets, the underlying goal of all those efforts is to drive sales and increase the company’s revenue potential.
So, when you sell products online, it only makes sense that you prioritize sales when designing marketing strategies for your business. And the good news is that even though sales and marketing tend to be separate, they can actually complement each other perfectly, with good marketing strategies making the sales process much simpler.
Let’s look at a few effective marketing strategies that will directly impact your sales performance below.
Introduce New Products
Whether you have an eCommerce store or run an Amazon FBA business, you usually have a few products that are selling much easier than the rest. And while focusing on these hot products can be a viable strategy to drive sales, there’s a limit to how much you can push the same product to the same audience over and over again.
For this reason, one of the best ways to provide an immediate boost to your sales numbers is to introduce a new product and create an aggressive marketing strategy to promote it.
When you have a new product, you can generate excitement through your social media and email marketing, run targeted paid advertising campaigns, and optimize new pages on your site to gain traffic through SEO. The underlying theme with a new product launch is that it allows you to market something new to the people who were already exposed to (and perhaps even bought) your other products, significantly increasing the chances of making new sales because of the novelty factor alone.
In fact, many online businesses have discovered that regularly introducing new products and running launch promotional campaigns can be one of the best ways to keep the sales coming, providing a way to attract both new customers and engage the current customers with something new they can buy from you.
Look for New Ways to Be Different
No matter the market you might be operating in, chances are that it is in a constant state of flux. That means that the strategies, branding, and positioning that worked a year ago might have become outdated, with more competitors implementing the same things and the market becoming oversaturated.
So, sometimes the best marketing strategies aren’t developed by using new channels or optimizing your current campaigns but by rethinking your entire position in the market.
You may discover that you need to shift into a new direction, creating a unique proposition that you use in all your marketing efforts to emphasize the difference from others, allowing you to gain and keep the attention of the audience that is looking for something new.
When figuring out how to generate sales leads, you may even be able to tap into new markets by expanding your horizons and identifying audiences you could start catering to in addition to what you already have.
For instance, if you already have an audience of people interested in a particular niche, you may find that they are usually also interested in a similar but different niche that complements the former one. And by expanding your offers to include a new range of products, you can not just have something else to sell but can also become a more comprehensive provider of solutions in your market.
Create High-Value Content
Online audiences are always on the lookout for new content around the topics they are interested in. And as a business, you can leverage that desire for knowledge to become a leading authority in your field, allowing you to build trust, create an audience of readers, and drive more sales in the process.
Sure, creating a comprehensive content marketing strategy takes time, but the effort you put into creating solution-oriented content will pay off for a long time. You only have to make a single video, article, or infographic once, but you can then expect new prospective customers to discover it indefinitely, providing you with a steady stream of new sales opportunities that don’t require any additional effort on your part.
But how can you develop content ideas that your customers will find interesting?
Well, a good place to start is to look at the most pressing challenges and issues your prospects and customers are facing. These are the things that should eventually lead them to choose your products, which means you can use the content to not just inform them about how to solve the problem but also suggest the products you’re selling as effective options.
You can also use content to review the products you are selling, providing people with more context about the different options in your selection and helping them make a more informed decision about which specific model or plan would work best in their situation. This can be especially powerful for driving sales because often, the biggest obstacle to a sale is the prospect being uncertain about which specific product they should go for in their situation.
Include a Risk Reversal
There’s a reason why risk reversal is one of the most effective sales and marketing strategies that has been used for centuries. By transferring the purchase risk from the buyer to the seller (yourself), you can remove the last barrier that’s preventing the prospect from committing and responding to your marketing efforts.
When you run your marketing campaigns, make sure that you highlight the ways that the buyer is protected through money-back guarantees, no-risk trial periods, and other risk reversal strategies that allow them to buy knowing that they can get their money back if something goes wrong.
Bottom Line
The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to drive more sales for your business, even if the short-term goals may be different. Consequently, it makes sense to use strategies like the ones above that are designed to provide an immediate boost to your sales while also setting up your business with long-term assets that generate sales consistently.
