Building a business can be one of the most exciting and fulfilling experiences of your professional life. But success doesn’t come easy. Ask any business owner and most will tell you that their greatest challenge is sales growth. Here are five digital marketing tactics that can help attract customers and grow sales.
5 Tips For Business Growth:
1) Talk With Your Customers: Whether in person, by phone, chat or social media, this basic first step helps you understand their questions, concerns and needs. Use this to create content in your marketing materials and website that takes away buyer barriers. By answer common questions, alleviating concerns and focusing on customer benefits, your products or services will be fully appealing.
2) Build Positive Reviews: Prospective customers who use search engines to find products or services that you offer are really performing a two part search. The first part is finding a set of companies who offers a solution to their need. The second part is finding who’s the best. Having great online reviews gives customers confidence that you’re the best choice. With great reviews, you’re more likely to get the click or call and you can actually shorten the sales process. Even if they don’t buy at the moment, good reviews solidify in customer’s minds that you’re among the best choices and that reputation can travel. To build positive online reviews, ask your happy customers to share their experience. There’s been increasing concern about fake reviews. For those who may be tempted about leaving fake reviews, it’s a bad idea. Fake reviews are considered a “grey hat” tactic, an unethical SEM practice that Google has not yet addressed. But once they do (and they will) it will become “black hat” and in an instant, companies posting fake reviews could find themselves banned from Google my Business/Google+ and/or listings removed from Google Maps.
3) Attend Networking Events: One of the best ways to grow your business is to meet prospective clients in person. Putting a face behind the company name, shaking someone’s hand and looking them in the eye is more impactful than any channel of digital marketing. After a business networking event, follow up with those you have met, put them on your email drip campaign (if they’ve agreed to get your emails) and set up one-one-one coffee meetings with those who hold the most promise, either as potential clients or partners.
4) Host Events: If meeting people at networking events is effective, hosting your own event is even more so. Running events effectively introduces you to all attendees rather than just the few that you meet as an attendee at a networking event. You can potentially reach more people with your emails and if you speak on a subject involving your business, it builds your perceived leadership status regarding the subject matter you speak about – the products or services you sell. Running an event also allows you to bring clients and prospects together in the same room. In this situation, it’s likely that your current clients will talk to your prospects and recommend you.
5) Measure Your Marketing Efforts: Knowing whats working and what isn’t is key to directing and optimizing your marketing efforts. Utilize Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to evaluate the source, volume and quality of all website visits or have an expert do this for you. Simple reports will tell you where your websites are coming from and exactly which channel of marketing is driving the most and best leads and sales. For example, if you’re invested in social media and paid search campaigns, it’s important to evaluate the performance of each – not just simple volume of leads or sales. Match the cost and effort it is taking to generate a certain level of leads and sales. The results will allow you to modify your marketing strategy and refine your approach as you go. Growing a business can be one of the most difficult, most rewarding things you do. Testing and investing in marketing channels that perform is a process that will lead to growth.
If you have any questions about how AdEdge can help you market your business online, you can schedule a free consultation and we will create a solid marketing strategy to help you achieve your goals.