Rome wasn’t built in a day. Your business won’t conquer the market immediately. However, you can’t take that as an excuse to let the business stagnate and remain in the same place, either.
If you’re having trouble driving sales, then you need to look at why that might be. It’s best to start off, for instance, in the shoes of the customer you’re trying to reach. What is their journey, and how can you make that even easier for them?
Here are some bits of advice that could help you drive the sales that your business needs.
How simple is your value proposition?
You may already be well aware of this, but all businesses work on a simple value proposition. What are you offering your customers? More importantly, how easy is it to see, exactly, what you’re offering your customers?
Take a look at the signs that your business might be too complicated, such as whether or not you get a lot of customer questions, whether you have trouble putting into words what, exactly, you do for them and even if your own team is making mistakes. You might need to just simplify your messaging, or you might need to simplify your whole means of doing business.
One thing is certain, it shouldn’t be a puzzle for your customers to figure out what you’re offering them.
Are you invisible?
This is the most common stumbling block for a lot of businesses as they first get up and running. The only world can be a very competitive place, especially, so you need to fight (and often invest) to make sure that you’re getting the visibility that you need to grab the attention of the customer in the first place.
Exposure comes in many forms, such as organic search, social media, and more, and a top marketing agency can help you set up the approach that gets you the exposure that you need. You then need to capitalize on the attention that you get as a result.
Get them engaged
After a customer discovers that your business exists, they’re likely to take a while to convert entirely. You might have their attention, but you need to get their interest. One of the best ways to do that is to let your products speak for themselves.
Creating great product pages is essential for an eCommerce site, for instance. It needs to contain all of the information that the customer wants to know about a specific product, while also showing it off in the most marketable light possible. Usually, this is done through a combination of helpful content and high-quality product photography.
This isn’t likely to be enough to convince everyone to buy immediately, but it gets the interest built that encourages them to take a deeper look.
Highlight your benefits
Once you have their interest, it’s all about convincing them. This convincing is done through every step of the customer journey, from the marketing to the product page. However, you can create pages on the site that are dedicated to that purpose.
Content marketing is used for a wide variety of reasons but one of the best purposes that they offer is allowing you to give customers a deep dive into any service or product, as well as the problems that those services and products might solve. End them with a great call to action and they might just serve to close the gap, leading customers from the point of the convincing right to the point of conversion.
Make the buying process simple
Though it might seem like a slam dunk from here, the truth is that many new businesses lose customers right at the point of conversion. In eCommerce, this is known as shopping cart abandonment and it happens for a variety of reasons. The two biggest reasons are poor payment options and making the checking out process too long. If customers aren’t able to pay by the method they like (be it a credit card, Paypal, or otherwise) they may give up on the transaction entirely.
Effective navigation during the buying process is essential, as well. For instance, breadcrumb navigation is great for signposting customers from beginning to end, letting them know exactly where they are in the process and how many steps they have left until the purchase is complete.
Develop a relationship
To put it simply, the better you can build a sense of an ongoing relationship with your customer, the more likely you are to get future sales from them. There are various ways of going about this, such as creating a community space for them to get in touch and share their thoughts via social media.
Another way is simply to get them to sign up for an email newsletter, allowing you to keep in touch and making sure that you always have a means of getting their attention with sales and other marketing campaigns. The contact doesn’t have to be especially deep or meaningful, simply creating a relatively regular touchpoint can help build the sense of familiarity that you need.
Build word-of-mouth
One of the great reasons to build a relationship with your customers is that it’s going to make them a lot more likely to spread positive word-of-mouth about the business. Word-of-mouth is much more effective than direct marketing is but also harder to earn.
Most customers have their defenses up when they’re engaging with what they recognize to be a marketing message from a company. However, coming from someone they consider a peer makes them more likely to trust that message.
You can also create your own word of mouth from scratch by getting involved with methods such as influencer marketing, but care has to be taken to do it carefully and as organically as possible. Otherwise, it can become clear that someone is spreading a marketing message on your behalf.
Offer great support all the way
No matter how well made your website is, no matter how great your navigation, and no matter how clear it is what you offer and its benefits, there are still going to be people who need help getting to the point of conversion. Using on-site chat apps can help you get in touch directly and help them right at the point that they need it the most.
However, support should move well beyond that first sale, as well. Retention should be a big part of your strategy as to how you grow sales. After all, it costs less to get a sale from someone who already supports the business than to reach someone brand new.
Keep them coming back
The above three steps are an important part of what comes beyond that sale. Indeed, you shouldn’t focus all your effort on gaining more sales from new customers, you should focus on what you can do to increase the lifetime value of each customer. This means working on customer retention.
A great way to do that, though an investment, is to create a business loyalty program that offers either discounts or unique rewards for continuous shopping with your business. There are simpler ways to build loyalty organically over time, as well, but it’s important ot find the method that works for you.
The tips above are a broad selection of actions you can take to better drive sales. However, you need to apply them to the specifics of your business as well. Figure out where you’re lacking and take the steps to address it with more specific solutions, too.