If you work in marketing, you know how challenging it can be to get your company’s products or services seen by the right audience. Yet, the more exposure that your company and products are given, the more likely they will be to sell successfully. If you are finding it tough to get noticed by the right type of consumer or get your products in the correct hands, here are five tools that can help solve your marketing woes for good.
Search Engine Optimization
93% of all online interactions start with a search engine. This means that it is absolutely imperative to ensure that your offerings show up when someone searches for them. Focus on creating an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and apply it to everything that you post on your website. A key ingredient to a successful strategy is keyword placement. You want to ensure that you are using relevant keywords that users will search to find your products as often as you can on your website—without overdoing it. For example, if your company sells a certain type of shoe that has a special feature, ensure that you are using keywords specific to that shoe on blog posts, in website content, and anywhere else you post written text online. Keywords like “shoe” are too broad, so focus on phrases like “hot pink knit laced shoe” so if someone is looking for something that specific, your website pops up.
Proper Organization
No marketing strategy can be successful without proper organization. This can easily be achieved by investing in customer relationship management (CRM) or marketing cloud software. In fact, companies that use CRM products successfully have improved sales by 29%. The numbers speak for themselves—you need to keep your customer data organized and easily accessible to anyone in the company who could benefit from it. Keep detailed records of all of your leads, prospects, and even lost opportunities so you can potentially remarket to them (depending upon the reason they decided against your company) in the future. If marketing sent an email blast to a customer, note that in their record so that the sales team is also in-the-know so they have all of the information before they reach out to make a sale. If you have a technical support portal or any type of issue reporting system, also be sure to note any problems or questions that customers have had with your offerings in their file so that anyone who speaks with them is armed with all of the necessary knowledge.
Good Old Email
Email marketing is an easy—and inexpensive—way to get your message heard by the people who care most about it. In fact, nearly 68 percent of teens and 73 percent of Millennials said they prefer to receive information from a business via email. It can be easy for emails to get lost in a spam filter or among the hundreds of other emails that prospects receive daily, though, so ensure that you have an ironclad strategy before you set out developing content. Decide as a company on how often you wish to contact customers so that you do not overwhelm them. Also, create some type of opt-in list so that people you are contacting do not feel like you are spamming them. Finally, ensure that you have a private IP address so that your messages don’t get automatically sent to spam filters.
Retargeting Ads
Retargeting ads are another interesting way to remind people who have already visited your site (and perhaps did not purchase) that you still exist and have something good to offer. Typically, you can put a tracking pixel on a page on your site like the trial page (if your company offers free trials) or the checkout page (if there is an easy way to prove that a purchase was not completed). If a customer lands on one of these pages, they will be served digital ads for your company or products when they visit other websites. This is a nice way to remind someone to come back and complete their purchase without being aggressive and directly contacting them.
Social Media Advertising
Nearly everyone is on at least one of the popular social media sites, so use this to your advantage. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter offer ways to advertise and target the perfect audience so your ads are not wasted on the incorrect group of consumers. Consider your target audience before you jump into advertising, though. For example, if you are a company that sells directly to businesses, consider advertising on a more corporate site like LinkedIn.
Marketing does not have to be the most challenging part of your company’s sales strategy. Follow these helpful tips and you will have no trouble getting your message seen by the right people.
