Marketing teams want to achieve amazing results for their businesses, and this can often feel like an impossible task in today’s world of digital marketing. Strategies that were once effective are quickly becoming outdated, so it can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to getting powerful results from your marketing and sales teams.
Fortunately, you can find strategies that will get you the results you need at every stage of your business.
This guide on powerful marketing and sales strategies will give you everything you need to ensure your marketing and sales teams are set up for success today and in the future.
Determining the optimal sales funnel
A sales funnel, when visualized, is more like a funnel than an actual funnel (you may recall from your high school science class). That’s because sales funnels are represented as multiple steps leading towards a final goal.
The last step in a sales funnel is usually the conversion goal, whether that’s an order placed online or a direct visit to your brick-and-mortar store.
The conversion rate—the percentage of people who reach one step within your sales funnel—can vary widely depending on what type of product or service you sell.
For example, if you’re selling business consulting services, it might be 50 percent; if you’re selling SaaS software to big enterprises, perhaps only 1 percent will sign on.
Finding the right online sales platform
If you’re a startup or small business, it’s likely that your marketing budget is still tight. In order to keep up with trends in digital marketing, you may have decided to do everything yourself – or outsource some or all of your work.
One option is to outsource parts of your marketing efforts through an online sales platform.. This can be a cost-effective way to get high-quality work done on a relatively low budget.
As such, it can be a great strategy for early-stage startups who want to learn digital marketing but aren’t sure what they’re doing yet
Marketing Automation set up
For small businesses, it’s a numbers game. Whether you’re trying to get new customers or close leads, your people need to be in front of as many prospects as possible.
To help them do that, you can automatically follow up with leads who don’t respond right away by using a reminder application or marketing automation software (there are dozens available).
Each one will have its own set of features but you can generally create rules based on when prospects open your emails, click links or perform actions like sharing content on social media.
It may seem basic but keeping in touch with leads every 2-3 days ensures they don’t slip through your fingers while also allowing sales reps to focus on closing new deals rather than calling their full pipelines over and over again.
Building strong relationships with customers
Without a doubt, consumers are digital: They’re more interested in interacting with brands through digital channels than they are on social media.
And yet, we often talk about digital strategies when we mean online marketing. To generate traffic and leads, marketers must craft a multi-channel approach that incorporates both digital marketing efforts and traditional, offline tactics.
Our marketing teams have access to data on our customers—the social networks they belong to, their contact information—that makes it possible to craft highly targeted messages that speak directly to them.
Trying out influencer Marketing
Whether you’re thinking about hiring an influencer or trying to find one yourself, start by looking in your own backyard. Do you know who’s a marketing wizard?
If they’re comfortable promoting products, reach out to them about getting on board with your brand.
You can also reach out to influencers on social media—their feeds are often full of opportunities for product placement and promotion.
Have a budget set aside for marketing so that when someone says yes to being a brand ambassador, you can immediately get them into production!
Improving website traffic quality
When companies are developing a digital marketing and SEO strategy, it’s easy to get caught up in collecting as much information about customers as possible.
In fact, many companies invest their entire budgets on tools to capture more data and traffic that they might not otherwise be able to attract organically.
It’s easy to understand why – with so much data available, marketers are afraid they might miss something if they don’t track everything.
However, when you look at how people interact with websites today (and even within a search), what most visitors want is high-quality content, not just more content.
Measuring your customer lifetime value
To understand whether or not your marketing strategies are working, you need to know how much each customer is worth to your business.
This is called lifetime value (LTV). It’s just like ROI—only instead of dollars, you measure it in customer value.
Lifetime value can be hard to calculate when you start out because you don’t have enough data yet, but calculating it early on will help make sure that no effort is wasted on customers who aren’t valuable to your business.
There are several different ways to estimate lifetime value, but here’s one way:
Take an average customer’s purchase size, multiply it by their expected lifespan with your company (in months), then multiply by 12.
Integrating offline advertising with online campaigns
One marketing strategy that many companies miss out on is integrating offline advertising with online campaigns. It’s a simple way to market your company.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say you’re an accounting firm looking to sell new clients to your services and you want to advertise in a magazine that has a large audience who may be in need of tax or accounting advice. You can include coupons or vouchers with your ad that customers can redeem through your website if they end up giving you business.