Increase Sales Exponentially with These 5 Marketing Strategies
Brand awareness is great, but how can you take the next step and use marketing to actually increase sales? Find five strategies in this blog from Impact!
Blog Post
7 minute read
Mar 21, 2024
It sometimes seems like there is a constant battle waging between salespeople who want to get to a sale fast and marketers who play the long game. But it is possible to implement marketing strategies to increase sales while still building a sustainable brand.
It’s rare to find solutions in business that truly make everyone happy. However, in this blog, we’ll try our hand at doing exactly that. The following sections explore how marketing strategies can boost sales for immediate growth, while also focusing on sustainability and longevity.
Most industries are dealing with a higher volume of competition than ever before which gives consumers a wider selection of options, while also making it more difficult to lock down and maintain market share. Learn how to create marketing campaigns that bring your brand out of the noise and into sharp focus in Impact’s Attract, Engage, Stand Out – Building Effective Marketing Campaigns Webinar.
Marketing and Sales: A Symbiotic Relationship
Marketing can help sales by creating the collateral they use on calls, building websites that complement and speed up the sales cycle, and increasing brand awareness so salespeople can focus on the benefits of their product or service instead of wasting time explaining what it is in the first place.
In short, the job of marketing is to help facilitate sales and move people through the buyer’s journey more quickly and easily.
This is particularly the case as the team responsible for each stage of the sales funnel changes. Traditionally, marketing would make prospects aware of their product or service and get them interested in it, and then sales would help those prospects decide to actually buy it.
However, particularly in the post-pandemic era, people are more interested in educating themselves than relying on a salesperson to guide them. That’s why it’s the job of a modern marketing team to not just make prospects aware, but also help them educate themselves, ensure that they’re ready to make a purchase, and facilitate their decision to choose one specific company over another.
In turn, a sales team can help marketing by sharing information from the field about their prospects and clients, providing feedback on what tactics and campaigns are working, and aligning on the brand story they’re telling during meetings.
Creating harmony between marketing and sales is especially important when thinking about how people consume content in the modern age. Simply put, you want the messaging in your marketing materials to be as aligned as possible with the language and messaging that salespeople use in conversations with prospects and clients.
If there’s a major disconnect between the two, it can lead to disappointed customers who feel misled, internal frustrations, and ineffective marketing campaigns that fail to generate conversions.
Marketing Strategy vs Tactics
A marketing strategy is a long-term plan to accomplish specific goals by reaching and engaging your audience. Marketing tactics, on the other hand, are the measures you take and tools you use to reach those goals.
Another way to think about it is that marketing strategy is about planning out where you want to go, and marketing tactics are how you plan to actually get there.
A team may employ any number of tactics, but typically has a single overarching marketing strategy.
For instance, if a company decides to focus on brand awareness by saturating the market with its product and logo, that would be its strategy. To do this, though, they can leverage any number of tactics aimed at brand awareness like influencer marketing, content marketing, affiliate marketing, product placement, and sponsorships.
Once you have a strategy in place, you can start choosing the specific tactics on which you want to focus in order to execute and realize the vision behind the strategy.
Marketing Strategies Designed to Boost Sales
Different marketing strategies may have slightly different requirements when it comes to execution. It's for that reason that it’s considered best practice to clearly define the core strategy before executing any one tactic.
It’s also important to keep your budget in mind when crafting your marketing strategy and choosing tactics. An ideal marketing strategy will fit well within your budget, be tailored to your specific goals, and should ultimately drive business growth.
1. Outbound Marketing
Reach out to customers and meet them where they are using an outbound marketing strategy. This is traditional marketing; it means getting your brand in front of someone who is not actively seeking it.
This marketing strategy is effective for increasing sales when your ideal audience might not be aware that a solution to their pain points exists, or you need to see results right away.
However, you don’t want to cast too wide a net and send your message out to just anyone. Using research to find the people that would actually get value from your website or contact information instead of just being annoyed by your message is crucial.
Outbound marketing tactics:
Print, TV, and radio ads
Cold calling or cold emailing
Trade shows
2. Inbound Marketing
The flip side of outbound marketing is an inbound marketing strategy. It increases sales by ensuring that the people who want exactly what you have to offer can find you. You can even help people who need you but don’t know it yet find you by focusing on education. Nobody wants to be sold to, but when inbound marketing is done right, your customers will sell themselves on your products and services.
Keep in mind the new marketing and sales funnel. This marketing strategy is designed for it, with assets that help people become aware of the solution to their problem, consider your brand, and evaluate purchasing.
Inbound marketing takes a longer time to start up and see results with than outbound; it may not be for you if you need to get to a sale fast. It involves a ton of content creation and search engine optimization to get people to find your website in the first place. However, if you’re patient, you can reliably make sales go up at a lower cost.
Nobody wants to feel like they’re just a number. That’s where personalized marketing comes in. 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides an experience that’s tailored to them, and 72% of consumers won’t even engage with your marketing unless it’s personalized. And when you implement this marketing strategy, sales do increase; personalized marketing has a 20:1 ROI.
This strategy uses a combination of inbound and outbound tactics combined with heavy research and audience segmentation to be ultra-precise in who you target with your messaging. That makes it more complex than other marketing strategies, but automation and other MarTech platforms can help you simplify these processes so they’re achievable even for SMBs.
Personalized marketing tactics:
Segmented email marketing
Programmatic advertising
Chatbots
4. Third Party/User Generated Content
Sales and marketing are among the least trusted professions today, making customer acquisition particularly difficult. Where your audience used to turn to you for information and education, they now actively distrust anything a business has to tell them.
That’s why focusing on what other people have to say about your brand through case studies and testimonials on your site, and user reviews and press mentions on other sites can be an effective marketing strategy to increase sales. Instead of forcing your message on someone who may not be interested in it, you simply shine a light on satisfied customers.
Third party content tactics:
Public relations
Highlighting reviews from sites like Yelp or TrustPilot
Content marketing (for case studies)
5. Focus on the Brand Story
Until they present a prospect with a contract, your salespeople aren’t performing the functions of sales; they’re the most high-value marketing your organization has. They reach out to your ideal audience, personalize their message, keep the brand top-of-mind, and more. That’s why aligning both teams is one of the most cost-effective and crucial marketing strategies a business can implement to increase sales.
This qualifies as a strategy rather than a tactic because it’s ongoing, consistently evolving, and involves multiple deliverables to execute properly. By regularly ensuring leadership agrees on what the focus of your brand is and that their teams are all telling the same story in client meetings, on a well-designed website, and beyond, you make your business clear and accessible for customers as well.
Brand story tactics:
Website
Sales collateral
Sales training
Aligning Marketing Strategies and Sales
There’s no one “best” or “correct” marketing strategy to increase sales. The one your organization should go with will depend on the size of your business and your marketing budget, what you offer, who your target audience is, and what resources you can allocate.
Not to mention that as the market changes, it becomes necessary to review your strategy and make sure it’s still aligned with your vision and goals. While these strategies are typically designed to last for years, regular marketing strategy assessments will help you decide when it’s time to make adjustments or pivots.
But for now, by having a clear understanding of your company, the market, and your audience, you can define an overarching marketing strategy and begin selecting tactics for swift and effective implementation.
And don’t forget to measure the metrics on new tactics informed by your strategy so you can track the efficacy of your new marketing efforts!
