Sales And Marketing For Businesses
If you have a business that is either online, or if you have a real-world store, it is important to consider all of your options when it comes to marketing your company. You may have products that sell very well, but it may only be because you are using the proper sales and marketing techniques that allow you to generate a substantial amount of revenue.
Whether you are selling physical products that are shipped out, or digital products that customers would download, you should be able to generate sales as a result of using the many marketing techniques that work today. If you are new to marketing, regardless of what you sell, the following strategies will help you generate more sales than ever before once you understand the advantage sales and marketing will have for your business.
Why Sales And Marketing Work Together
Before showing you how to use certain marketing strategies to improve your business and make more sales, it must first be shown how sales and marketing are essentially synonymous. Making sales refers to all of the products that you will sell so that you can earn revenue, whereas marketing is how you get people to the products you are selling.
Both of these go hand-in-hand, primarily because one cannot exist without the other. If you want to make sales, you must you marketing. And if you are to be successful with your marketing, you must not only understand the products that you sell, but understand the customers that you are targeting. Some of this information may not be available to you when you first start out because you may not have experience with selling anything, nor will you have any idea how to begin marketing the products that you have to offer.
The key is to understand who it is that you are targeting, and also understand what keywords they will be searching for when they are ready to buy certain products. Let’s first begin with the top three options that you have for marketing to potential buyers, and then show you how to expand your business exponentially using a strategy called cross-selling.
How To Market Your Business
In order to market your business, you only have three choices that are going to help you make substantial sales. The first is using PPC marketing, also known as paper click traffic, something that is available from companies like Google and Facebook. You will pay for every click that you receive, with no guarantee that you will make a sale at all.
This can become very expensive if you are testing products that do not have a track record for making sales, or if you have a landing page that is not converting very well. The second type of marketing that you can use is called search engine optimization. This is typically done by a professional SEO company.
These businesses can do what is called on-site and off-site optimization, both of which are very important when you are trying to generate sales from the search engines. They can help you rank individual pages on your website for specific keyword terms using strategies that work today.
You do not have to pay for every click that you receive as you would with PPC traffic, but obtaining results can take quite a while, especially if you are trying to rank pages on your website for very competitive keyword terms. The final strategy that you can use is list building. This is regarded by many people to be the most profitable marketing strategy of all.
Your goal is to simply generate a list of individuals that will be motivated to consider signing up for your newsletter, something that they will do in exchange for a discount on your products or receiving something for free. People that have lists that exceed 1000 people can often earn a full-time living. Like search engine optimization, all of the traffic that you receive will not cost you money for every visitor, making this one of the most economical ways to generate sales every day.
Where To Begin
Now that you have an overview of the top three ways to generate visitors to your website where you are selling products to the general public, you might start to see the advantage sales and marketing as for your business. The type of product that you sell, as well as the landing page, is only half of the equation.
The other half is how quickly and cost-effectively you are able to generate consistent traffic. More specifically, the traffic that you receive needs to be very qualified, targeted traffic that is actually searching for the products that you sell. Most of them will find you through the Internet, which can be done through PPC traffic and search engine optimization, both of which will help you earn more money and also build your list.
Start With Search Engine Optimization
The first place that you should begin is by using SEO strategies that can help you generate a significant amount of revenue. As mentioned before, it can take a substantial amount of time to rank each of the pages on your website which is how you will be able to generate traffic. The pages that you build must focus on what are called longtail keywords. These are keywords phrases that are 4 keywords or longer, the easiest ones that you can rank for.
The drawback is that you will only generate a few hundred visitors a month once they have reached first page rankings. However, because they are so easy to rank, you can rank hundreds of them, and this will help you generate tens of thousands of visitors every month. Once these are in place, you can then begin to test the different landing pages that you have for the products that you sell. The ones that are the most successful are the pages that you will want to target in the next step of the marketing process using PPC advertising.
Paper Click Advertising
The second step of this process is to use paper click advertising which can be done on a multitude of different advertising websites, but most people will choose either Facebook or Google. Both of these have their own advantages. Google is the oldest of the two, and the advertisements that you take out can be seen on the search results for specific keywords, and also on websites that have Google ads on them.
Many people are using what is called retargeting which is where a pixel will fire, and a cookie will be placed in the browser of the visitor that has clicked on the ad. Every time that they go to a different website that allows retargeting ads to show up, it will be as if your advertisements are following them across the web.
Facebook is also a great PPC platform to use where you can target both keywords and demographics. The benefit of using Facebook is that you can motivate people to share the advertisements that you post in their newsfeed, allowing you to generate viral traffic. The more that people share your advertisement, it has the possibility of getting free visitors from all over the Facebook platform, which can help you generate more money.
Additionally, all of the links that are pointing back to your website from the different social media platform pages, will help boost your rankings on the search engines. Once you have started several PPC campaigns, targeting the most profitable pages that you discovered using search engine optimization, you can then move on to the third stage of this marketing strategy. This one will show you the true advantage sales and marketing will have for your business because you will actually be building a list.
Building A List
Once you have finally created high converting webpages that you have discovered with SEO strategies, and have successfully launched PPC campaigns that are increasing your visitors exponentially, you can then begin to build a list of people that are interested in the products that you sell.
One of the top reasons for doing this is it allows you to contact these people repeatedly as they had given you permission to do so when they signed up. They will willingly type in their name and email so that they can be added to your list in exchange for a free gift that you are providing them. There will be a popup or subscribe box on the landing page that people will find, giving them the option to subscribe or not.
If you’re free offer or discount is good enough, they will definitely subscribe, and then you have the ability to contact them whenever you want. As mentioned before, many people have become extremely wealthy, or have created a full-time income, simply by having a small list of just 1000 people. It is possible to build a list that is much larger than that, allowing you to send out tens of thousands of emails on a regular basis to people that are targeted potential buyers.
The emails that you send out should not always be offers to purchase something, but should also add value for your subscribers. This will make them loyal subscribers, people that are actually looking forward to the emails that you send, and through the process of reciprocity, they will return the favor by occasionally purchasing products from you.
Taking This To The Next Level
Although using these three strategies can be very helpful in determining what products are selling the best, and can minimize your advertising costs, it is actually possible to go much further with these three marketing strategies to start generating an exponential amount of sales. As mentioned before, using social media can be very beneficial because your ads can go viral when people start to share them. Unfortunately, even if you are building a list, you will only have access to your list, which can be very limiting at first.
It will take some time to build a responsive autoresponder list, just as it will take time to rank multiple webpages using SEO initially. What you will want to do is gain access to all of the other lists that people have, selling products that are similar to yours. This is not in reference to companies that are in direct competition with you and the products that you market.
These are companies that sell products that would complement what you are selling, and likewise your products would complement theirs. You will want to start contacting people that are also selling products that are in the same niche. You will want to approach them, offering to allow them to market their products to your list if they will do the same for you. This is what many people referred to as cross-selling, a way of getting multiple business owners and individuals that have very large lists to agree to market your products.
You will do the same for them, creating a win-win scenario, where everybody can benefit. There are also side effects that are extremely beneficial for your business such as the people on their lists may also subscribe to yours, and may also follow you on your Facebook page. This is a great way of not only selling products, but building your social media followers and also your autoresponder list, helping you to expand your ability to target thousands of additional people that may become long-term customers.
Using these three simple steps for marketing the products that you sell, you should start to see a dramatic difference in the amount of money that you make. You will also begin to clearly see the advantage sales and marketing will have for your business using these proven techniques. The key is to use search engine optimization to determine which pages are converting the best. You will then send PPC traffic to these same pages to increase the number of visitors that you get.
This will lead to an increase in the number of sales that you generate, plus it will allow you to build a list of happy subscribers that are willing to purchase products from you regularly. This literally is the key to minimizing the amount of money that you spend with your advertising, plus it will allow you to quickly discover what products and landing pages are converting so that you can target your advertising efforts only on the products that sell and build a list at the same time.