Small business sales tips for 2024
As a Marketing Consultant, one of the main reasons people hire me is because they aren’t getting enough sales and they need help to achieve increased revenue. This blog posts sets out five tips I give clients when they are struggling to make sales - they work for both product and service-based businesses.
1. Optimise your website for success
A website is essential for selling your product or service but it is of absolutely no use if you build it and let it gather dust.
The first thing you want to be sure of is that your website is filled with up-to-date information that your customers can easily understand.
It is crucial your website loads quickly and that users can find what they are looking for with ease and this often means refining your navigation (i.e how do you customers get from a to b?) .
My final website related tip is that SEO is not just a ‘buzz word’. It is critical to the success of your website. I upskilled in SEO not long after starting my Marketing Consultancy and it has allowed me to find thousands of pounds worth of work for free (other than my own time spent optimising my website).
2. Do not rely on friends and family as your ‘marketing strategy’
It only takes a few scrolls on a social media platform to find business owners posting a graphic saying ‘how to support a small business’ and putting the onus on friends and family to share their content online.
If you are this person, I can understand the temptation (many many people do it!) but I would encourage you to think of it in a different way.
From a purely technical perspective, there is a strong chance your aunt or your next door neighbour is not your ‘target audience’. Do not confuse social media algorithms about who your content is aimed at. For example if your 70 year old neighbour is a top fan of your hipster clothing brand on Facebook, that is a bit of a red herring to the robot who is trying to work out what your brand is about!
On a purely human level, the sooner you see your business success as your responsibility and nobody else’s exciting things can happen.
3. Consider which social media platforms are right for you
There are a lot of options for social media platforms. Just because a platform exists, doesn’t mean it is right for your business. Have a look into the demographics for each (i.e the age, gender, location or interests of the average person who uses the website). Does the average user fit with the core target audience for your business? If not, then it won’t naturally fit within your marketing strategy.
The goal with any marketing efforts for a business is to communicate the right information, to the right people, at the right time, in the right way. Online channels are no exception to this rule.
4. Know your audience
When I first became a Marketing Consultant I initially found it surprising how many people would answer ‘everyone’ when I asked who their target audience is. This is very (very) rarely true - in fact, it has never been the case for any of my clients. It is likely you could define a few key ‘personas’ for the people who usually buy your products or services. What age are they? What is their income like? What problem, need or desire does your product resolve for them? Where are they based geographically? What social media sites do they use?
Your marketing will never be strategic until you know your audience. Once you know this you can set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic & timebound (SMART) objectives that will help you to achieve your goals.
5. Email Marketing is your friend
There are very few businesses where email marketing will not help to achieve increased revenue if you have spent time truly getting to know your audience and what makes them tick.
The conversion rate (i.e the amount of people who buy from you after reading your email) is the data you want to track if you are already an e-commerce business who wants to see how well your emails are serving you.
If they aren’t working - find out what links are being clicked and which are being ignored. This one piece of research could give you a clue to how to improve your email marketing efforts. This is one of the strongest indicators for a service based business too.
It can be challenging to map out the conversion to sale if you aren’t an e-commerce business but if your email subscribers are clicking links related to buying from you, there is an indication of ‘buyer intent’ associated with this and it could be an indicator that your email marketing is beginning to convert.
In short, people do not allow you to access their inbox unless they trust you. In signing up to your mailing list they have let their guard down. Treat these people like VIPS, do not bombard them and aim to deliver genuine value to their lives through your emails.
