Focusing on driving digital sales can make it easy to lose sight of the customer — in a marketing landscape concentrated on proving ROI, it’s not uncommon to zero in on metrics and forget about who you’re selling to. Rather than knocking on doors, taking prospective customers out to lunch, physically showing people the product you’re selling and making follow-up phone calls, companies that utilize digital marketing to make sales have to reach their audience across various devices like smartphones, computers and tablets.
However, savvy marketers know that personal tactics can be part of the marketing planning process to increase digital sales and set their brand apart from the competition’s. Here are three clever methods to achieve that goal:
As noted in a blog on Stride, “Social media can be an effective tool to showcase a personal side to an organization.” Prospective customers don’t solely make decisions based on the quality of the product or service you’re selling — they also look to trust the brand they purchase from.
Communicating with people via social media platforms helps make your organization seem approachable, boosting your chances at connecting with customers and getting more sales.
To ensure your social presence resonates with customers, you should establish a brand voice that is relevant to your buyer personas. Also, consider including viewpoints from people who are the best at communicating the strengths of your company in a plain way — a Clickz.com article suggests that including posts from your company’s CEO can make your brand seem more human. Whatever tactic you decide to use, one of the most important aspects of communicating via social media is realizing the impact of follow-up communication. When someone responds positively to your social media posts or shares what you have written with others, you should thank them and build a strong rapport. The easier it is for customers to talk with you, the more likely they’ll feel comfortable making purchases from your company.
Offline communication can be part of your marketing planning process to increase your digital sales — especially when it’s skillfully combined with online marketing efforts. Utilizing both online and offline marketing together makes a powerful strategy for boosting your bottom line. According to Entrepreneur, by integrating offline channels into your strategy, you can add yet another touchpoint to communicate with your audience. For example, you could try mass market approaches to generate leads offline such as trade shows. You can start by utilizing digital marketing to find prospective customers interested in going to your trade show, and then you can use the trade show to drive leads towards your digital channels and into your funnel — it works both ways.
You need to know prospective customers’ wants and needs to effectively make digital sales. Creating customer profiles for your leads can help you with conversions as well as customer retention. How do you create an outstanding customer profile? “The Complete Guide to Hidden Sales Strategies” recommends collecting information on leads via online and offline touchpoints, including data gathered by forms on your website, forms filled out at trade shows, etc. The information you collect should be combined with other data you gather with your digital marketing tools, including the prospective customer’s browsing habits, online search behavior, and interaction with your website content. Then, you can find patterns between customers that have similar profiles and incorporate that information into your buyer persona, essentially strengthening your entire digital strategy.
Customers expect a certain level of personalization to feel comfortable interacting with your brand online. Interestingly, companies will spend approximately 14 percent more of their budget on digital marketing in 2015 than they did in 2014, as noted by the Entrepreneur magazine article. Since digital marketing is taking up more of marketing departments’ spends, knowing how to optimize your digital strategy is key to success. So, if companies make sure that their marketing planning process includes adding personal tactics to their digital efforts, they will meet the needs of the modern customer, make more digital sales and stay ahead of competition.