There are thousands of methods to increase your company sales and increase the incoming flow of potential customers. The problem is that there are no completely universal solutions – an idea that worked for a hundred businessmen may be useless for a hundred and one. Therefore, any advertising or marketing tips on how to increase your company sales should be taken as hypotheses.
In this article, we have collected several proven and non-obvious solutions that, with the proper approach, will help almost everyone. Implement them gradually, test on small budgets and keep the most effective ones for your business.
Make a sales funnel
The sales funnel is the path that a person goes through from the first contact with your product to the moment he parted with the money. First, a person learns about the product, then becomes interested in it, then somehow shows a desire to purchase and, finally, buys. Your task is to decompose all sales into conditional stages and track how many people moved from one to another.
Let’s say you have a travel agency. You run contextual advertising. Your funnel might look like this: 100 people viewed the ad, 30 clicked on it and went to the site, 20 called and one bought the tour.
By analyzing the funnel, you can understand which stages need to be improved. For example, here you need to work with the text of the ad and the sales department.
Use Mystery Shoppers
Harry Friedman, in his book No Thanks, I’m Just Watching, says that in retail, almost the main problem in sales declines is the sellers themselves. They lack discipline, they don’t understand the needs of potential buyers, or they completely burn out and start being rude to customers.
If you are looking for a solution to increase sales growth in a retail store, then try using mystery shoppers. Develop several scenarios, launch actors into stores at different times. Check out how salespeople handle stressful situations and how they treat friendly people.
Learn the secrets of competitors
To ensure sales growth, you need to carefully study competitors and not be shy about borrowing successful practices from them, Mosigra founders Dmitry Kibkalo and Sergey Abdulmanov say in the book Business as a Game.
An easy way to explore is to become a competitor’s customer. Go through all the possible paths of their potential buyers. Become their secret shopper. When talking with the manager, come up with excuses not to buy and study their work with customer objections.
Check the competitor’s website in Similarweb — the service will allow you to find out the share of paid traffic from the resource and clarify which sites people mainly come from. It’s free.
Serpstat and MegaIndex services will show what queries the site is on the first page of Yandex and Google search results, what advertisements the competitor uses.
Try contextual advertising
When you use outdoor advertising, you seem to be hitting a large audience with your message at once. For example, when you open a barbershop, it is worth hanging a banner in the same area. But if you are selling a conditional brick, then it is illogical to promote it through banners – most of those who see the message will never need it.
If your product requires targeted advertising, try promotion through Yandex.Direct and Google Ads. They will help show ads to those who monitor something specific in the search bar. For example, if a person is looking for something like “buy a brick Moscow”, then he is probably interested in the price of your brick.
Run social media ads
Every day, about 22 million people visit VKontakte alone. Another 15 million people open Instagram every day, and about 19 million people in Russia watch videos on YouTube every day, writes the LiveDune agency. Over the years, social networks have accumulated a lot of data about their users – their interests, gender, age, marital status. Use this data to run targeted ads.
For example, you decide to promote the delivery of ready meals. Find groups of competitors on the social network, show your ad to their audience. Try broadcasting the ad to subscribers of restaurants and cafes in your area. Expand your search – add those who use deliveries from local stores.
You can filter the audience for display by hundreds of parameters. The price depends on the competition. The advertising budget can be saved if you select people in a way that another advertiser did not guess.
Work with those who have already bought
In Customers for Life, Carl Sewell recommends focusing less on acquiring new customers and more on building loyalty among those who already use your products. This is logical – if people are satisfied with your business, word of mouth will work and new customers will come by themselves.
Start a mailing list: collect email addresses when buying, send useful materials and exclusive discounts to customers. Just do not be intrusive, otherwise your letters will go to spam.
Introduce loyalty programs that at the same time increase sales and set you apart from your competitors. For example, in coffee shops coupons “buy five cups, get the sixth free” are often practiced.
Run native ads
Banner blindness was first talked about back in 1998, and in 2014 Business Insider confirmed that people really don’t react to banner ads on the Internet. To convey your proposal to people, you need to use other, more subtle methods.
Try native media advertising. In the language of marketing, these are materials that are integrated into the context of the site and the interests of the recipient. To put it simply, it is useful content in which the brand is promoted neatly and naturally.
For example, a common advertisement would be a call to buy an apartment in a particular residential complex. Native advertising will be the article “How to choose an apartment near the metro and not lose.” It lists important selection criteria and it turns out that a particular LCD is ideally suited for them.
Use coupons
If you have a mass consumption product, try to increase demand with the help of discount coupon selling services. The service itself usually does not need to be paid, it earns on the cost of coupons.
This method has both pros and cons:
- On the one hand, it helps to improve brand awareness. You get access to a large audience, attract customers for free.
- On the other hand, the discount should be impressive, 50% on average. And it is not a fact that the participants of the action will then come to buy at full price. Therefore, it is worth carefully calculating the economy before launching.
Launch a staff competition
One way to increase motivation and increase sales is to run a competition among employees. This works both in retail stores and in other systems where you need to communicate with customers and close deals.
Try to make the competition clear, transparent rules. Do not hide the criteria by which the winner is calculated. For example, use a conditional scoring system – 1 point for attracting a new client. For the conclusion of a one-time transaction for a certain amount – 2 points. For a long-term prepaid contract – 3 points.
Sellers need to understand what they are competing for. Introduce non-material ways to support the winner – for example, a comfortable place in open space, a photo on the honor roll.
Use cash support methods, pay bonuses. Encourage employee of the year with a valuable prize.
Implement convenient calculation
If your target audience is people who are willing to endure anything for a low price, then this advice is irrelevant. For the rest, it’s always worth working on customer service and shopping experience.
Give your customers the freedom to pay the way they like. If you work offline, implement card payment systems. Buyers of online stores are interested in paying with electronic money.
Launch scent marketing and audio marketing
Pay attention when you enter the bakery, there is always the aroma of freshly baked bread. Even if it is already evening, and pastries hit the shelves in the morning. The secret is in special equipment that spreads odors.
Such aromas increase appetite, which means they stimulate us to make a purchase. This is the essence of scent marketing. Such a promotion should be used in any business that sells food.
Another way to motivate people to spend money is audio marketing. . Psychologists discovered back in the 1980s that music helps us relax and make buying decisions easier.
Most often, such promotion is used in retail stores and in the service sector. For example, in the morning hours, slow music is played in stores to set up visitors for a calm walk. In rush hour, on the contrary, the melody becomes more dynamic, so that even a relaxed person is imbued and starts buying faster.
Try different music in your business, find out which one increases sales the most .
Start a sale
Discounts in and of themselves make no sense. When we want to increase sales, we mean income growth. To do this, you can use non-obvious tricks with discounts and sales.
Here’s how it works in grocery retail:
- We take a product from the range for which there is a maximum demand.
- We give him a discount. The cheaper you sell, the better. Even at or below cost.
- The expectation that people will come to the store in bulk for this product. At the same time buying something else, already with a normal margin.
A similar system is used in many areas. For example, in stores with appliances, the main income may come not from the sale of smartphones, but from the sale of covers, flash drives and other seemingly not very expensive goods. But they are a high-margin product.
Calculate the economics of your business and try to increase sales in this way.
Recommend a competitor
In the book of Sergey Abdulmanov “Business as a game” there is advice that at first glance seems absurd: if you do not have some product, the seller can look for it from competitors and advise the person to go to them. This is how consultants work at Mosigra. They specify when the game will appear in their salon and offer the person to wait. If not, then just look on the Internet, where there is the right product and talk about it.
According to Abdulmanov, this is a way to increase loyalty to the company: a wow effect is created, the client remembers unusual behavior and feels that he was treated kindly, without a thirst for profit. Such friendships turn one-time customers into regular customers. In addition, people share similar stories, which provides free advertising.
Implement an anchor effect
To increase sales, give the buyer the opportunity to compare prices and, as it were, cling to the most profitable option – in marketing this is called the anchor effect.
See how it works:
- We take the product that we need to sell. Let’s say it costs 10,000 rubles.
- We introduce several similar products into the assortment matrix – much more expensive and much cheaper. For example, for 40,000 and for 5,000 rubles.
- We arrange them in the store so that the client goes from the most expensive to the cheapest.
As a result, psychology will work in favor of the product we need. It is not the most expensive, which means that they are not trying to deceive and sell at exorbitant prices with it. And not the cheapest, so not free nonsense.
The choice in principle stimulates sales, but if we carefully advise the person on the right solution, it will turn out to be even more effective.
Sales Growth Checklist
Implement items from our checklist in order or randomly, test ideas and leave the best:
- Make a sales funnel.
- Use mystery shoppers.
- Learn the secrets of competitors.
- Try contextual advertising.
- Run social media ads.
- Work with those who have already bought.
- Run native ads.
- Use coupons.
- Run a staff competition.
- Implement a convenient calculation.
- Try scent marketing and audio marketing.
- Run a sale on an anchor product.
- Recommend a competitor.
- Implement an anchor effect.
