Increase Sales Exponentially with These 5 Marketing Strategies

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 do exactly that, exploring how to make sales go up with long term plans that satisfy both departments and grow a business’ revenue exponentially. Read on to find out how. 

Want to start producing leads right away? Optimize your website with the tactics in our blog, 5 Ways to Generate Leads Online.

How Can Marketing Help Sales? And Vice Versa? 

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 go with the marketer’s company.

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. 

Marketing Strategy vs Tactics 

A marketing strategy is a long-term plan to accomplish specific goals by reaching and engaging with your audience, while marketing tactics are the things you do to hit those goals. Another way to think about it is that marketing strategy is what you’re doing, and marketing tactics is how you’re doing it. 

A team may employ any number of tactics, but typically only has one overall marketing strategy. 

For instance, a company may decide to focus on brand awareness by saturating their market with their product and logo. That would be their strategy. To do this, they can leverage tactics like influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, product placement, or pursuing sponsorships. 

Marketing Strategies That Increase Sales 

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. 

Inbound marketing tactics: 

• Content marketing
• SEO
• Social media

3. Personalized Marketing 

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 

Using These Marketing Strategies to Make Sales Go Up 

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, what you offer, who your target audience is, and what resources you can dedicate to making it work. 

And of course, as the market changes, it becomes necessary to review your strategy and make sure it’s still the right one for you. While they are designed to last for years, if your situation is different than it was when you picked your strategy, it makes since to adjust accordingly. 

But for now, by having a clear understanding of your company and your competition, you can choose one strategy and begin choosing your first tactics for implementing it as quickly and effectively as possible. 

If you’re ready to start optimizing the digital assets you already have, check out the tactics explored in our blog, 5 Ways to Generate Leads for Your Business Online.