Six Easy Ways to Increase Your Sales
We are all about helping small businesses find affordable and effective advertising, and we do that through the Local Buzz Savings Magazine. If you are looking to increase new leads over here in the East Bay, give us a call, we are here to help.
Let's talk about your marketing. When we think about marketing, a lot of times we think about:
The number of leads that are coming in
The number of impressions that we’re seeing
This is very present in online marketing. Everyone says, "Well, I got X amount of impressions." That is great, but there is so much more that you want to focus on versus just the number of impressions or the number of website visits you get. We want look at the number of leads that
are coming in, or if you're on a website, the number of impressions. We want to track how many of those leads turn into opportunities. A lot of times people pick up the phone and they give you a call. We are also finding more people are bypassing the phone when they find your ad in our magazine and go straight to your website. Then they will fill out a form on your website. This is called a lead capturing: a lead turning into an opportunity. They are expressing interest in your product and service.
The third thing that you really want to focus on in your marketing campaign is the number of close ratios. You want to not only know how many people you're targeting, how many of those targeted leads are turning into opportunities, and how many of those opportunities are turning into sales. What is an opportunity? It's someone who is actively interested in your product right now. This third one tends to be overlooked, but to really understand your marketing as a whole, you have to know how many of those opportunities are turning into sales.
Six Stages That Will Increase Your Sales
There are six stages and understanding each one of these will help you increase your sales.
Stage One - If you build it, they will come You need leads. You need customers. Get your name out there by: running an ad in your local magazine, paying for Facebook ads, putting together your Yelp profile and your Google My Business profile. This is where “impressions” come in. You can see how many impressions your online ad will get. This is a really tricky thing because the impressions are great, but what's better than an impression? The number of people who pick up the phone or fill out the form and become opportunities.
Stage Two – Web Contact Form It is important that if you have a web contact form or a voicemail. If you know that you're not going to get back to your customers or your potential leads until a certain time, make sure you let them know on your voicemail. It’s important to let them know that you return phone calls Monday through Friday, between X time and X time. Same thing when they submit a web form, you can do the same note saying, "Thank you for your form, I will contact you within these business hours". You can also hire a virtual assistant. Either have someone come into your office or you can hire someone who works specifically with your type of industry to help set appointments.
Stage Three – Have a script This way when someone calls in, you will have the right flow to ask them their specific questions, whether you're the business owner or you have someone answering their phones, people are going to have very common questions that they will ask when they call you: What is it you provide? How much will it cost? When can you come out? Even in our company we have scripts. I have one that's sitting right here by my desk, so when I answer the phones, I know exactly how to answer with each question. I have been doing this for 20 years, but I still find it helpful to have a script nearby.
Stage Four – Know your competitors Consumers like choices. When they're calling you, they're also calling a few of your competitors. Know what makes you stand out, make sure to ask the important questions to your potential customers that they didn't even know that they wanted to ask. The best way of doing that is knowing your competitors.
Stage Five – Follow up This is where I see a lot of my clients fall off in the marketing spectrum. They are very good about getting their phones to ring, answering their phone calls and returning them in a timely fashion. However, it feels really salesy to follow up with your leads. But guess what? If you're in the business, that is what you are part of. You are part salesperson and part of the salesperson is closing those leads. If you don't want to come off sounding salesy, here's a trick that I tell my team. Call them and just see if they have any other questions. That's not a sales question, that's a general human to human, "I am here to help." Make sure that when you do follow up, if they did go with your competitor, find out why. I know this is a hard one to do, but I promise you, it will help you and your business. Was it because of pricing? Did they offer something that you did not offer? There are so many reasons that it can be. Just say, "Hey, do you mind me asking why?" You'll be surprised how people will answer.
Stage Six – Retargeting Just because someone didn't sign up with you today doesn't mean that they may not be ready in 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days. Because they reached out to you and because you had that really lovely interaction, they're more likely to buy from you next time, especially if you're offering another product or service that they didn't need the first time you called.
What’s next? You have all this information, how do you put it into play? Well, it is a numbers game. You want to know how many leads are coming in, so start tracking that information. Out of those leads that are coming in, what you want to know is where those leads are coming from. Is it from your Local Buzz Savings Magazine? Is it from your Facebook ad? Is it from a pay-per-click ad?
Then the second thing you want to know is out of those leads that come in, how many of those turn into opportunities? How many of those are interested in your product and service and want to learn more?
The third thing you want to know is how many of those do you close? I can't tell you the number of clients that I had talked to who said, "Oh, I thought this ad campaign was doing really well because I got so many opportunities from it, but as I dug deeper, I realized that I actually closed less of those opportunities." Or vice versa, I've heard people telling me, "Oh my goodness, I didn't get very many leads from your magazine, but once I started digging in deeper, your magazine produced more sales than any other advertising that we did."
Just because you're getting a lot of leads, it doesn't always mean that you're closing all those leads or that they're good quality leads. Keep an eye on not only the number of leads, the number of opportunities, but the number of sales. That's where the magic happens. The numbers don't lie. Then every month, fine-tune what you're doing.
Then you’ll come away with some questions:
Do you need a better lead to opportunity conversion?
Do you need another opportunity to sales conversion?
Is there something you can do?
Can you pull money away from one program and put it to another program that's producing more?
Let your numbers guide you to make your sales stronger.
We are here to help. Not only do we want to help you advertise in the Local Buzz Savings Magazine but we love marketing and talking about marketing. If you have questions, call us! We are happy to do a free marketing consultation, and we'll chat your ear off about what we know and what's working. We hope you found this helpful.
