How to Increase Sales through Digital Marketing

Sales is the Holy Grail for businesses. It is vital for business growth, sustainability and survival. Being able to sell consistently also demonstrates that your business has product-market fit. This implies that your products and services are addressing a real customer need.  In this article, we will explore how to increase sales through digital marketing. We will cover the following topics.

• how to increase sales in general
• need for digital marketing
• how to increase sales through digital marketing?

But how can you increase your sales?

How to Increase Sales

You will find lots of online articles and information on how to increase sales. Most of these cover multiple techniques, strategies and tips for increasing sales. However, the fundamentals of the sales process have remained more or less the same. We suggest that you focus on the following key areas to increase sales.

• Establish Product-Market Fit: You need to create a great product or service. Something that the customer wants and is willing to pay for. This is a primary requirement. No amount of marketing can compensate for a product that the customer does not care about enough. You need to focus on delivering a unique value to your customers through your products and services.

• Build Trust & Credibility: This is all about creating your brand and spreading awareness. You need to focus on the visibility of your business. You will need to communicate your value proposition to your customers and share testimonials from delighted customers. This will ensure that your brand remains on top of the customer’s mind and there is a strong recall.

• Customer Engagement: This involves all the activities that provide a very good user experience to your customers. This will also build a strong customer relationship. This includes seeking customer feedback and taking necessary action. You need to focus on your existing customers first. According to studies, a business is likely to generate 23% more revenue from a customer who is engaged.   

• Strong Marketing: Marketing is the catalyst that drives sales. Marketing involves activities that are used to promote your products and services. In the rest of this article, we will discuss how to increase sales through digital marketing.

Why Digital Marketing

Marketing has become digital. In fact the term digital of “digital marketing” almost seems redundant. Even for businesses that rely on brick-and-mortar stores for their sales, marketing is predominantly online. This is because the customers are online and you simply need to be where your customers are. The shift to digital marketing has come with its own complications. Earlier you were concerned with reaching your target audience through newspapers, television, radio and outdoor. But now you have dozens of options. Also, these are constantly changing. Some of the common digital marketing channels are shown below.

We will next look at some of the techniques to increase sales through digital marketing.

How to Increase Sales through Digital Marketing

Some of the most effective digital marketing techniques to increase sales are discussed as follows.

1. Create a Great Website

Your website is your storefront and creates the first impression for your potential customers. A well designed website with very good content builds trust, credibility and awareness for your brand. You need to ensure that you deliver great value and an excellent user experience through your website. A great website will attract organic traffic, generate leads and eventually increase sales.

2. Use Organic Search

Use SEO to optimize your website. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is a process to optimize the web pages so that they rank high in the search results page of Google and other search engines. SEO enables you to get organic (free) traffic through natural search results. This means you don’t have to pay when a prospect clicks on your link and lands on your website. The higher your website is listed on the results page, the more people will see it. More will be the traffic to your site. For a detailed understanding of the basics of SEO, please refer to this beginner’s guide.

3. Use CTAs

A CTA is a call to action.  This is a prompt on a website that tells the user to take some action. A CTA is usually written as a request, such as “Buy Now”, “Sign Up”, “Register”, “Subscribe”, etc. They are generally used as a button or hyperlink. CTAs are very effective in driving sales as they increase conversion rates. Use a good CTA that is easily visible and simple to locate. The CTA should also help the user to navigate across your website.

4. Email Marketing

Email marketing is the use of email to promote products and services to customers. The purpose of email marketing could be to:

• create awareness
• build interest
• sell something new or
• increase customer engagement and loyalty.

However, it is not enough to just send emails to members in your email list. It is vital to segment your emails based on the customer personas. Studies show that segmented emails are opened more frequently. They also have a higher click-through rate.

It is also very important to automate your email campaigns. Email automation will enable you to contact customers at exactly the right time. In addition, you can track metrics, present offers, and send emails to customers who have left your website without taking the desired action. Please refer to this article for tips to improve your email open rate.

5. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience. This includes social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. The objective of social media marketing is to promote your brand, drive website traffic, and increase sales. This is done in several ways including:

• creating very good content aligned with your various social media profiles
• listening to and engaging with your audience
• analyzing the outcomes, and
• running social media campaigns.

To learn more, please read our blog post on “What is Social Media Marketing”?

6. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves creating and sharing relevant content like articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, and other media. The objective is to attract, engage, and retain your target audience. Through content marketing, you can establish your expertise, promote your brand awareness, and eventually drive sales. You can distribute the created content through various channels. These include your own website, email campaigns, podcasts, and social media channels like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Content marketing will help you to drive sales by:

• Attracting qualified traffic to your website
• Increasing your visibility, brand awareness and recall
• Establishing your thought leadership, relevance and authority
• Increasing engagement with prospective buyers
• Creating personalized buyer experiences

7. Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website on search engine results pages (SERPs). You can use paid advertisements to appear on the SERPs. You can bid on keywords that users of Google and other search engines might enter when looking for products or services. This provides an opportunity for your ads to appear along with other results for those search queries. That improves the chances of a prospect clicking on your ad and coming to your website or any specific offer page. These ads are also referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

SEM offers advertisers the opportunity to display their ads in front of customers who have a strong intent to make a purchase. This is why SEM is extremely effective as a powerful way to grow your sales and business.

8. Use Opt-In Forms & Pop-Ups

You can use an opt-in form to take consent from visitors to your website that you will contact them later with further information regarding your products or services. Opt-in forms will enable you to add users to your list of email newsletter subscribers. This can be a very effective strategy for lead generation for your business.

An exit popup (also called exit-intent popup) is a website overlay that is displayed when the user attempts to leave a web page. The purpose of this pop-up is to convince the user not to leave the website before taking the desired action.  The pop-up will request the user for contact details so that the engagement can be continued later through email. 

Studies have shown that pages that use exit popups have a higher conversion rate. The top-performing pop-ups can generate nearly 10% conversion rate on an average. Exit pop-ups are also very effective when it comes to cart abandonment. The exit pop-ups can provide you another chance to pitch the customer or capture their email address so that you can try and revive the sale later.

9. Remarketing

Remarketing is a form of digital marketing in which you can position ads in front of users who have earlier visited your website. It is an effective approach to target users who have shown interest in your products or services. Remarketing gives you a second chance at converting previous visitors to customers. It is a very efficient way to increase sales.

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have very good remarketing capabilities. These social platforms have pixels that you can install on your website. This will allow you to collect the cookie IDs of your website visitors. You can then match these IDs to specific social media users and display relevant ads.

In Conclusion

Digital marketing can be a very effective approach for you to increase your sales. It will enable you to communicate your brand to a large number of customers in a fast and cost-effective way. Also, it is easier to track and measure the performance of digital marketing campaigns, as compared to traditional marketing.

In addition to the various techniques explained above, you need to take the following action to improve the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns.

• A/B Testing: A/B Tests will enable you to study which option generates the most conversion rates, resulting in sales. These tests are designed to compare two versions of whatever you wish to test. This includes, landing pages, CTAs, headers, colors used in a page, etc. 
• Measure, Improve, Repeat: You have multiple options and channels with digital marketing. For instance, there are many different forms of digital advertising like PPC, social or display ads. Which is best suited for you? One of the approaches to figure this out is to try them, measure your results, make improvements and repeat. With respective to content, you can use Google analytics to understand the performance of different pages on your website. This will provide insights for making well-informed decisions to grow your sales. You can scale-up the particular digital marketing approach that works best for your business.
• Integrate Your Marketing Channels: You need to integrate your marketing channels. This will ensure that your users have a consistent brand experiences across the different platforms and channels. You need to align your different marketing campaigns to best reflect your branding.

We have created a glossary of digital marketing terms with simple definitions for you to quickly check the meaning of any unfamiliar term. You can check it out here.

If you are interested in other digital marketing topics, please refer to our Blog.

Other References

If you are keen to learn more about how to increase sales through digital marketing, you can refer to the following articles.

• Increasing Leads and Sales with Digital Marketing
• 12 Digital Marketing Strategies to Ramp Up Your Sales
• How Digital Content Marketing Helps You Increase Revenue