How Digital Marketing Can Increase Sales

How do you market your products and services? If your first answer isn’t “online” or “through digital channels,” you’re missing the mark and a lot of opportunities.

In the B2C space, your success and growth depend greatly on digital marketing. Born in the 1990s, digital marketing exploded onto the scene in the 2000s, most notably with the introduction and growth of social media sites. A digital marketing strategy is a must, and it’s important to understand how to increase online sales with digital marketing.

How Can Digital Marketing Increase Sales?

You might think an email about your company’s services or an ad on Facebook wouldn’t contribute much to sales. Those tactics are just for awareness, right? Awareness of your products and services is only part of the equation.

A strategic, focused, integrated digital marketing campaign that moves the customer through the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of buying results in lead generation, click-throughs, and sales.

Digital marketing is not like traditional outbound marketing that puts your message out to the world. Excellent digital marketing uses an inbound strategy that makes a consistent impression on and fosters interaction with customers so that they seek you out, they come to you.

Here’s a scenario:

You start using Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads, encouraging clicks that take customers to your landing page.

You might offer an e-book on a topic related to your market in exchange for an email address.

Customers read the book, which references a video from your website.

Now that prospects are on your site, they watch the video.

It’s intriguing, and they’re considering a purchase, so they have a question.

The next stop becomes your Twitter account to ask. Your reply satisfies them, and it contains a link back to your sales page.

Boom.

The customer makes a decision and buys your product.

What started with a strategic plan aimed at a target audience resulted in a sale. That’s the ultimate goal of digital marketing for businesses.

How Can A Local Business Use Digital Marketing To Increase Sales?

As a business, you need to know the best practices that make digital marketing work.

First, you need an excellent, valuable product or service to offer to your target audience.

Next, you require a well-designed website with valuable, relevant, well-executed content and images.

Once you have your website optimized for sales and ready to manage the influx of customers that will come through the digital marketing campaign, you’re set. Now on to those best practices that form your digital marketing strategy.

Researching and identifying your target audience:

Who are your prospects? What do you know about your target audience?

A shotgun approach to putting out content and advertising doesn’t work well. Research your customer demographics.

Find out where they live and hang out, in a general sense, and the types of things that interest them.

What social media sites are they most likely to use? Once you’ve identified the key characteristics of your audience, insight on how to complete your marketing plan comes into focus.

Creating value beyond your product or service offering:

Buying prospects want the most bang for their buck. What do you have to offer them beyond your product or service?

Create value by supplying information using content marketing.

Send links to blog posts, e-books, videos, and infographics that connect with your product and market.

Run a discount campaign on an ad that requires an email address in return.

Don’t constantly pitch your brand or product as that will get old and will not be very interesting to read. Think of what your customer would like, and supply it.

Integrate your materials and your website so they link and flow with one another. Keep your voice and message consistent in all content and imaging.

If you’re connecting with your audience, the value you provide builds not only sales but customer loyalty.

Implementing a digital marketing campaign for your local business:

If your website is ready, your audience is defined, and you’ve identified ways to add value, it’s time to act on the information gathered.

What digital marketing methods will you employ?

Consider email, social media sites, video sharing sites, and search engine marketing. Collect a subscription list for your emails and segment it to customize messages if needed.

Create a good design template, plan valuable content, and schedule email blasts strategically.

Develop a killer subject line – it can make all the difference on whether or not an email is opened.

For your ads and website content, research the relevant keywords for your target audience. What are they typing into the search bar? Use keyword search tools to find high-volume terms that are meaningful to your audience.

Get involved in relevant social media sites, too, and find ways to provide good content that encourages your prospects and customers to interact with you.

Advertise on the social media sites in the markets defined by your audience research.

Integrate these campaign elements with linking from an email to a video to a landing page, and so on, to keep the customers on your pages, making it more likely that they’ll make a purchase. Implement a conversion-focused campaign for the best results.

Establishing an automated system of customer contact, including remarketing:

Why should you send an email to a customer?

There could be many reasons: as a thank you for visiting or making a purchase, to send a coupon or advertise a special offer, to announce a new blog post or video, or to reach out and touch someone with a personal message of “Happy Birthday.”

One of the most important reasons to send out an email is to do remarketing or following up on a customer that interacted with you or visited your site but didn’t make a purchase.

You can provide value and try to change the outcome. Always give the potential customer a reason that they should purchase from you, something that shows how you stand above your competitors.

 Automate the schedule of sending these types of emails to ensure that you’re sending them and staying on the top of the customer’s mind. Don’t let too much time go by, but don’t bombard buyers. Find the sweet spot of just enough and put it on auto.

Tracking and Measuring Results:

After you design and implement the first stages of your campaign, how do you know it works?

Pay attention to the metrics. You can get information on website visits, new leads generated, customer clicks per ad, convert to sales, and more through Google Analytics and other similar tools.

Social media sites automatically collect information for you. You must compile all your data and determine the results, including your ROI on the campaign.

Adapting Your Campaign to Results and Market Changes:

You may be certain you picked the right keywords to place in your online ads, but your analytics tell you that some of your ads perform better than others.

What do you do?

Go back to the research. In any part of your plan, when you find that performance isn’t up to your expectations, find out why and adjust your campaign tactics.

It’s also true that sometimes the market changes, and you need to revisit your strategy.

Google algorithms change, so you may need to revisit your website, your content, and your keywords.

Digital marketing isn’t static.

Be vigilant and adapt.

It’s Time to Increase Your Sales through Digital Marketing

Now that you know how to increase sales with digital marketing, what are you waiting for? One problem a lot of local businesses face is that this all sounds great, but they don’t have the time to create and manage a digital marketing campaign.

Digital Envy can boost your sales and ROI with our proven methods and digital marketing expertise, making it easy for you. Contact us today to schedule a consultation.