4 Ways Of Generating Sales Through Proactive Marketing

Do you have trouble coaxing sales out of your customers? Then what are you doing to incentivize them? 

The retail sector is competitive. Whether you exist online, offline, or have a presence in both areas, then you’ll find that you are competing with everyone; from the large companies such as Amazon, through to the smallest independent business.  You need to be effective and ruthless in your marketing. 

Here are four ways of generating sales through proactive marketing in your business. 

Online Voucher Codes

Voucher codes are a great way to increase your sales on your online platform. The most effective way to use this to full effect is to share codes for very limited periods of time.

Create a “flash” event that means that customers need to act quickly to take advantage of the offer. 

Create an email campaign using a service such as Mailchimp and email all of the customers that you have on your database. 

By using this a mailing service such as this, you’ll be able to monitor who is opening and interacting with your emails. This will give you a gauge of their effectiveness. 

Coupons

Many customers still love a physical coupon. In fact, there are many people out there that will collect hundreds of coupons together so that they can get the very best deals they can. 

Of course, you don’t need to be into extreme couponing to appreciate a deal, and it might be worthwhile investing in a mail coupon book that you can distribute to your customers if you have a bricks-and-mortar store. 

Think about offering coupons across a range of different products. The idea is that you entice the customer in with the coupon that will give them a small discount, and they buy more items when they’re in the store. 

Be sure that you put expiry dates on all of your coupons. Many retailers forget this and end up with problems on their hands months or even years later. 

Recommend a Friend

Do you want to grow your customer base and encourage sales from your existing customers at the same time? 

One of the best ways to do this is by getting people to recommend a friend to your products or services. By generating a code for each of your customers to share, you can track provide a discount for customers who have recommended a friend. That way, you’ll get two sales and an increased customer base. 

Promote Scarcity 

Do you only have limited stocks of certain items? If you have an item with a limited stock level, that you won’t be replenishing; let customers know. 

Scarcity is a great driving force to increase sales. You may not even need to reduce the price to entice customers into buying the item in the first place. 

Remember, be honest with your customers. Don’t try and trick them into buying anything under false pretenses, it will only come back and bite you if you lie to them. 

3 Steps to Build a Small Business Marketing Budget

Budgeting is something that many people struggle with in their personal lives, so it should come as no surprise that it's often difficult for small business owners as well. There are many different facets of running a business which requires an operating budget. Some, like paying staff and acquiring merchandise or raw materials, are quite obvious, and typically well accounted for. Things become a bit more nebulous, however, once it comes to budgeting for necessities of a less physical nature.

The area that often suffers the most for small businesses is marketing, which traditionally relies heavily on word of mouth. While word of mouth can certainly be a powerful way of getting your name out there, you still need to find a way to get your business in front of somebody to start that word of mouth in the first place. Here are a few steps that can help small business owners establish a marketing budget which makes sense for their size, income, and industry.

Identify Your Target Demographics

If you're running a business, you need to have a good idea of who your customers will be. Do your products attract more women than men? Is it perhaps better aimed at younger, more tech-savvy audiences than older consumers?

You might think your business is more simple than that—a restaurant is mostly interested in serving food, and “hungry people” hardly qualifies as a demographic. Even here, however, there are considerations to make.

Is your restaurant providing a luxury dining experience, serving food made with the finest ingredients? Or are you aiming to offer more casual and quick fare? All these things can drastically affect how your marketing should be designed, where you will see the best results, and how much it will cost. Better still, aiming your marketing at the right demographics may actually save you money, by ensuring a higher return on investment and minimizing advertising venues that won't reach your intended audience effectively.

Establish an Online Presence 

No matter what you're selling, it's essential these days to have some sort of an online presence for your business. At minimum, this keeps anyone from impersonating you and trashing your business's reputation. More importantly, however, is the fact that researching businesses online is an extremely common consumer tactic, and by having accurate and detailed information readily available on the internet, you can guarantee they're getting the right impression.

The exact type of online presence you'll benefit from most will vary depending on your business model. A restaurant, for example, may need a website, equipped with menus and online ordering, while a retailer may want a digital storefront to sell their products to consumers around the globe. Social media can be beneficial to those who may need to communicate quickly with customers about changes to operating hours, menu items, or events, as well as acting as a type of customer service to handle complaints.

What you need for your online presence will also determine your marketing budget, to an extent. While web hosting servers can be quite cheap (many plans are available for under $10 a month), there are some upfront costs when it comes to setting it up, and websites do require regular maintenance to continue functioning securely. While hiring professionals can be an added expense, it's very often worthwhile to ensure your customers have a safe and simple experience with your business.

Crunch the Numbers 

With the above in mind, it's now time to figure out what your budget should look like. Demographic data of your target audience informs your choice of advertising medium, which you can use to estimate marketing costs. You'll also know, at this point, what it will cost to build your web platform and its monthly maintenance costs.

Putting these numbers together into your budget will provide some kind of baseline, but there are other things that you may want to account for in your budgets, such as events and promotions. This is where budgeting can get complicated, and education may need to step in. Finance degree programs are specifically designed around managing money efficiently in this way, so hiring or consulting an expert to fill out a budget more thoroughly can be beneficial in the long run.

Of course, you could also earn this education yourself and keep things in your own hands, if you so desire. Holding a degree in an area of business like this can also be advantageous to your business's image and assist in securing loans and funding by proving you have trustworthy expertise. 

Budgeting can be hard, but it doesn't have to be. Marketing is a critical part of your business's success and should be accounted for in its budget at an appropriate level. You can help your marketing budget to go farther with less by targeting the right demographics through the right venues, building and maintaining a presence on the web, and consulting experts with business degrees (or acquire one yourself) should you get in over your head. Handled properly, this marketing budget can help your business soar to heights you might never have dreamed possible.

5 Fantastic Hacks to Reach Your Ideal Client Online

Establishing a reputable, attractive, and consistent presence online is something you have always strived to do for your business. You know that this sort of activity will pay in dividends for your success. Your business image is everything when it comes to building your brand, so you need to make sure you’re appealing to your ideal client. The online world is undoubtedly the best place to reach your target demographic and it’s relatively easy to do too. Consider some of the following five fantastic hacks and you will soon be able to reach your ideal clients seamlessly online.

1.SEO

One of the most effective ways to reach your ideal client on the internet is by honing in on your SEO strategies. If you have no idea where to begin you should definitely look into reputable SEO Marketing Companies. They will be able to help you gain clarity with your keywords for whatever online platform you are focusing on. When you master the art of search engine optimization, you will have a higher chance of hitting the top spots in Google when your ideal client searches for a specific phrase. This is the perfect way to reach out to your target demographic online.

2. Social Media Engagement

Posting on social is an excellent way to reach out to your ideal client, but it is a two-way street. You can’t expect them to like and comment on all of your posts and then never give anything back. You need to actively engage with your ideal client in order to convert them into a paying customer.

3. Vibrant Videos

Videos are a unique and vibrant way to grab the attention of your target audience right away. Whether you want to use YouTube as your main platform or you prefer IGTV, there are so many ways you can present your informative and value packed videos.

4. Clear and Concise Copywriting

You can use clever, clear, and concise language to appeal to your ideal client every single time you post online. Step into their shoes and think about what they really want to hear. This will help you to sell your products seamlessly without coming across as too pushy. If you struggle with writing you could always outsource your copywriting to a freelancer.

5. Amazing Ads

If you really want to reach your ideal client online, you might need to put some money in advertising. Facebook adverts often turn out to be an excellent investment for many businesses, especially if they are very targeted. Do some research and see if they might work for your business; these types of adverts often take some trial and error.

Give some of these ideas a try and see how they work for your business. You might find that some work much better for your particular industry than others. Be sure to track your metrics whenever you try something new. This will give you a clear indication of whether it’s going to work for your business in the long run.

Getting The Word Out About Your Business

These days, we hear so much about social media marketing. There are countless online articles about growing your marketing reach by using Facebook targeting. There are huge developments occurring in the artificial intelligence algorithms that marketing companies are using to directly target very specific groups of people. While online marketing is of huge benefit to a business, it can be very easy for a small business to end up focusing so much of their attention and spending a vast amount of their budget on online marketing, that they end up missing out on traditional marketing techniques. 

While we spend a lot of our lives in the virtual world, there is still a real-life realm that we all inhabit. We all go places, use products, and services, and we all interact with other human beings from time-to-time. Traditional marketing is still as relevant as it ever was. It is important that businesses devote as much of their attention and budget to other forms of marketing, instead of putting it all into social media and search engine optimization. 

Link Your Brand To A Useful Product

There are many different branded products that you could give your customers free-of-charge as a way of thanking them for their sale. Think about creative items that you could include with your products or services that are relevant to what the customer has just paid for. 

These branded items would be very cheap to buy-in, and you could factor the cost into the actual service or the products that your customer is getting. 

A great example of this would be if you were running a car dealership, a garage, or any other business relating to vehicles, you could give free custom car air fresheners. Simply get some printed up, and then, whenever your customers see it in their car, they will be reminded of your business.

Write It Large On The Side Of A Bus

There are more and more cars on our roads each year. We all need to get somewhere, and the car is often the best way of getting there. In fact, people are taking jobs further from home and traveling more each day. 

On these longer journeys, they will often pass lots of busses, and bigger vehicles that have marketing space on the sides. Often, you might subconsciously catch a glimpse of an advert that you did not know you had seen. This handy marketing technique gets your message to a very large pool of potential customers. 

Don’t Overlook The Power Of Printed Media

Many people claim that printed media is dead. They talk about how we all just read our news articles online. And, while it may be true that sales may have dropped of traditional newspapers, they are still widely read among certain demographics. 

Newspapers and magazines remain a great place to place adverts for your business. They can reach a very wide audience, or, you can use local papers to focus your attention on potential customers who may be closer to home. 

Don’t Forget To Talk To People

There are many forms of marketing that involve you communicating directly with your potential customers. This means talking to them as they pass you in the street, knocking on their doors, or phoning them up. 

Although many people criticize this type of marketing as being invasive, it can still be very effective. By using the right language and approach it is possible to build up a connection and convert leads into sales. 

This type of marketing may seem a little basic in comparison to the more focused social media approaches, or even in comparison to email marketing, but it does allow you the opportunity to build a connection with would-be customers in order to bring them into your brand family. 

Billboards

Billboards are again a marketing tool that is very much still very powerful. Placing adverts onto billboards will create a very strong visual impression on any passing motorist. 

As our roads get ever busier each year, more road users will be exposed to this type of marketing. You could even use digital billboards that may allow you to implement videos in your marketing message. 

Conclusion

It is very important that as a small business owner, you remember that there are lots of ways that you can reach your customers. By investing in a wider variety of marketing techniques, you will be able to reach a wider range of people and build effective brand relationships with them.

Why Your Marketing Isn’t As Successful As It Could Be

Marketing seems to grow in importance with every passing year, and it’s not hard to see why. Since it has never been easier to get a business up and running, there is simply more competition than ever before -- and that means that companies have to work harder than ever before if they’re going to stand out from the crowd.

You’ll already know all this, and will have your own marketing strategies in place. But if you do not see the kind of results that you’d like to see, then you’ll need to do something about it. The good news is that you can make changes to your strategy whenever you want, and once you have, you’ll begin to see better results pretty quickly. But how do you do this? We take a look at a few tried and tested methods below. 

Minimal Time and Effort

As much as you might like to think it was not the case, the brutal fact about marketing is that it’s something that requires a lot of time and attention. Or at least, it’s not something that you can just phone in. If you’ve thus far been hoping that a social media post here and there will yield results, it’s time to work a little harder. Sit down and develop a robust strategy that’ll up the sophistication of your marketing.

You Need More Knowledge

Of course, there’s little value in putting in more time and effort into your marketing if you are not sure what you’re doing in the first place. In this case, it’s worthwhile topping up your knowledge before you move forward. There are programs such as Legendary Marketer that’ll give you the training and resources you need to improve your marketing campaigns. Remember: marketing is a challenging, dynamic area of your business, and the more knowledge you have, the better you can do things.

Outdated Trends

It could be that you actually have an excellent marketing campaign. It’s just what it’s only excellent by 2015 standards, not the standards of 2020. Marketing tactics are always evolving, and, as such, it’s important that you’re keeping up with the latest trends. It could be that the core of your message is fine, but that you’re presenting it using outdated models. Make the change to more modern marketing tools, and you’ll notice an improvement.

There’s No Measurement

Finally, perhaps the most common reasons for underwhelming marketing campaigns is that business owners fail to track what works in their campaigns, and what doesn’t. There’s a whole host of data available that can help to push you in the right direction, but you have to use it for it to be any good. Your data will, first, tell you what your customers want to see and what they like. Second, it’ll let you know where your marketing is reaching peak engagement, and which aspects don’t gain any traction at all. 

Incorporate these tips, and you’ll find that your marketing campaigns have much more success in the coming year and beyond.