The 6 Best Practices That Will Grow Your Sales in 2014
Sales Renewal clients are accustomed to hearing the term JointSourcing – a unique business model that combines pay-for-performance with expense sharing. The model means that we focus on not simply what works, but what works cost effectively. The key to growing sales through JointSourcing is a multi-pronged approach to sales and marketing.
The six key “prongs” we focus on when creating a JointSourcing plan for our clients are:
1. Website Marketing
- This includes building a website that is written with your customers and prospects in mind. (Start by Choosing the Right Domain Name.)
- Optimize your website for search engines – all the right keywords and search terms in all the right places.
- If you sell locally, in a physical location, be sure to also maintain a local presence on the web.
2. Content Marketing
- Create good-quality content (for your blog, via downloads and white papers) on a consistent basis.
- Let people know you have this great content via social networks that are appropriate for your prospects and customers. (Want some tips for building your Facebook business page?)
3. Social Media Marketing
- Grow your social network – join groups, forums; interact with customers and peers – and spread the word about your business by creating fresh content for your network. (Here’s a real life example of how it works.)
- You can also look beyond the obvious major networks – have you considered using Reddit for your business, for example?
- And of course, your customers are often your best ambassadors – use customer reviews and testimonials to your best advantage.
4. Customer Marketing
- Keep the customers you have happy and earn ongoing revenue from them with E-mail newsletters (and remember to continually test your message!)
- Loyalty programs – from multiple-purchase discounts to special membership programs – are another way to generate revenue from loyal customers.
5. Paid Marketing
- Quick to start and offering near real-time control, advertising in general and Pay-per-Click advertising specifically, can be a very effective way to get your products or services right in front of prospects who are ready to buy.
- And with the right targeting, messaging and offer, direct [paper or email] marketing is hard to beat for growing B2B or B2C businesses.
6. Strategy and Management
- No marketing program should be contemplated without benchmarks and continuous improvement built right in. That’s why businesses need to employ all of the analytical tools and best practices available in order to be continually assured their sales and marketing programs are cost effective and yield the best R.O.I. (And please don’t forget the old fashioned telephone, because Marketing ROI without Call Tracking is Like Baseball Stats that Exclude Away Games).
Will 2014 be the year your business maximizes its online sales and marketing to grow sales? Sales Renewal can help get you started. Contact us to find out how.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Will 2014 be the year your business maximizes its online sales and marketing to grow sales? Sales Renewal can help your business with JointSourcing – a multi-pronged approach to sales and marketing that focuses on the following 6 programs.
How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 21
Sales Renewal’s insight:
You spend the money, he takes the credit!
Considering an increase in your ad spend? See 11 tips for doing search ads right first.
Check SalesMemes.com every Friday to see the latest SalesMemes: the best and worst ideas to increase sales. See more #HucksterHank and his colleagues: #BadExecutionBob, #SmugMarketerSam and #TrustworthyTom.
Pay-per-Click (PPC) Advertising Can Grow Your Business…
… But Doing It Cost Effectively Isn’t As Simple As They Claim
Google AdWords’ promise for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is alluring: “Want to grow your business? Put your message in front of potential customers right when they’re searching for what you have to offer.” Bing AdCenter will tell you: “You can reach millions of unique searchers… Pay only when your ad is clicked on – it’s that easy.”
It is easy to get pulled in by the apparent simplicity of online advertising. For as little as $5 a day, you can start an online advertising campaign. Just choose your keywords, write some ads, select your geographic target, enter your credit card, and turn the campaign on.
The Benefits of a Pay-Per-Click Campaign
In fact, the benefits of using PPC in your online advertising efforts are clear. In addition to the relative simplicity of setting up a campaign, pay-per-click advertising offers you:
- Campaign Control: You have quantifiable control over your target audience, location, and keywords. Customized campaigns and specialized URL placement allows you to increase relevant traffic to your website.
- Conversion Control: Because you create targeted landing pages to match your relevant keywords, you can design different pages for visitors at different phases in the Customer Buying Cycle.
- Cost Control: Among efficiencies like geo-targeting and keyword targeting is a little known feature of PPC – the ability to remarket campaigns. So, if the user searches your keyword more than once, you can bring up your ad again – at no charge to you.
- Customer Control: You can choose the number of times the customer will see the ad so they don’t get bombarded with ads every time they search the keywords. This way, you ads stay fresh in prospects’ mind.
And PPC offers benefits that you cannot get from any other method of paid advertising or online marketing. For example:
- Pay for What You Use: With PPC, you pay only for the ads that are clicked on. Compare this to print advertising. No matter how targeted your postcard mailer or newspaper ad is, there is guaranteed to be a portion of the list or subscription base that is not relevant to your business.
- Immediate, Measurable Results: You see results with PPC right away, often in the form of increased traffic within minutes or hours. You can (and should) monitor these results on a daily basis and use them to make immediate, informed changes and tweaks to your campaign. Compare this to SEO, which can take months to bear fruit and therefore months before you know what’s working and what needs changing.
- Dependable Process: Any updates or alterations to the advertising platform are announced well in advance. Compare this to SEO, where you are quite often at the whim of algorithmic changes, ones that leave much to guesswork.
PPC Done Right: Not As Simple As They Lead You To Believe
But it is also easy to lose sight of how much time and attention your PPC campaign needs to be done right and to be cost effective. This can be a major challenge for businesses trying to set up and run a campaign by following the “simple” instructions provided by the search engines.
Keep in mind that:
- Search engines are in the business of making money, so they recommend what will be easy (for you) but will also have the highest spend possible (for them);
- Even though you can start a campaign for as little as $5 a day and you can see immediate, measureable results (see above!), it can take months and months with such a small budget to get any statistically significant results that would allow you to make all the refinements and adjustments that are so key to PPC;
- Advertising online is competitive, and it can literally take your hard earned dollars quickly without the accompanying ROI if you do not know the ins and outs of PPC; and
- There are over 300 settings that can make a difference in spend on a PPC account. And many of these settings need to be managed and changed throughout the campaign – often on a daily basis.
Sales Renewal has found that it is usually worth the investment (10-15% of your ad budget plus a small set-up fee) to work with a professional agency that specializes in PPC to set up your campaign and optimize it regularly (daily, weekly, or monthly depending on your needs). This will save money in the long run as the investment in professional management will more than come back to you in lowered ad costs and higher traffic.
Is your PPC campaign working the way you would expect it to, or would you like to see better results for your advertising dollar? Sales Renewal can help, and is offering a free review of your existing online advertising campaign. New to online advertising and interested in finding out how to incorporate PPC into your sales and marketing mix?
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Sales Renewal’s insight:
It is easy to get pulled in by the apparent simplicity of online advertising. For as little as $5 a day, you can start an online advertising campaign. Just choose your keywords, write some ads, select your geographic target, enter your credit card, and turn the campaign on. But in reality, it isn’t that simple.
How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 14
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Firing yourself – it’s the next big thing!
Read about how Sales Renewal is pioneering this exciting new field.
Check SalesMemes.com every Friday to see the latest SalesMemes: the best and worst ideas to increase sales.See more #TrustworthyTom and check out his polar opposites #SmugMarketerSam, #BadExecutionBob and #HucksterHank.
Social Media and Your Time Investment: the Payoff Isn’t Always Obvious
Small- and medium-sized business owners cannot take their time lightly. So questions like, should I invest time in LinkedIn? or Is a Pinterest presence worth my time? highlight important considerations.
We certainly don’t advocate jumping on every single social media bandwagon. While they all look like free advertising vehicles at first glance, the learning curve and time commitment can be significant. But plotting a course, and staying true to it, usually pays off.
What’s a Florist doing on LinkedIn?
With an unlimited supply of pictures of beautiful flowers Pinterest seems like an obvious choice for a flower shop (Facebook too). The photo-friendly, super-sharing communities are generally good for consumer-oriented businesses building a client base. But LinkedIn?
Maybe not so obvious. However, when you’ve plotted the right course, and are steady in your approach, you’ll probably be rewarded with sales.
And in some cases, thank-you notes. After all, business people are consumers with grandmothers too.
~ – ~ – ~ – ~ –
Want help charting smart social media moves? Need a little guidance and assistance decided which sales and marketing efforts are worth your time? Want to hand off some of the day-to-day details to realize more sales increases? Contact us. That’s what we do.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
For consumer-oriented businesses, Pinterest and Facebook seem like obvious social media vehicles to use to increase sales. The photo-friendly, super-sharing communities are generally good building a client base. But LinkedIn?
Why Hire Sales Renewal? We’ll Fire Ourselves
The advantage of outsourcing sales and marketing to third parties is that it takes a great deal of time and skill to become expert in the many technologies and sales & marketing programs required to grow revenue and even more time, skill and dogged determination to continuously do so over the long haul.
While we’ll admit that Sales Renewal is not the only firm that can do this, we truly believe we are fundamentally different because our commission compensations means we’re not motivated to amass billable hours. Instead, our motivation is to increase our commissions by growing your sales. And this alignment of economic interests leads to some very interesting situations.
Billable Hours vs. Productivity – or Why We Fired Ourselves
When we can deliver a service at a world-class level, we will do so; when we can’t, we subcontract it. Do we have an example? Glad you asked.
Initially, we provided advertising services in-house. However, once we realized we were foregoing commissions, we fired ourselves and hired an outstanding ad agency to do the job.
It came down to this: advertising is a skill that might take a lifetime to master because its ground rules constantly changes (Google has to protect its billion dollar revenue stream doesn’t it?). And online search advertising – because the search engines provide lots of “knobs” you can turn to affect performance, pricing, and targeting (and change them weekly!) – is even harder to master. When we took over an account we felt we got about 90% of the way there, but reaching the last 10% was getting increasingly difficult. Quite simply, we realized we’d reached a point of diminishing returns. Extending our efforts in self-education – especially after identifying some truly excellent advertising agencies – didn’t make sense, for Sales Renewal or for our clients.
Although telling our clients that we had effectively “outsourced” their advertising felt a little strange, they welcomed the news, and the results. We were doing a good job with online advertising, but we’d identified advertising experts who could do better. And that allowed us to focus on our clients’ greatest goals: increasing sales.
The difference between Sales Renewal and some other sales and marketing firms is that we’re not satisfied with doing a “good” job with sales and lead-generation activities when we can find others who will do a great job with the same tasks. After all, you wouldn’t be, and thanks to our aligned economic interests, neither are we.
When we partner with a client, we operate as a General Contractor. As such, we expect the best from each player on the team – whether those players are permanent members of the Sales Renewal Team, or specialists we depend on for discrete tasks.
As the inspirational t-shirt put it: Do you want to be good or do you want to be great?
We always aim for great. Want to hire us? Great. If we can’t do the very best for you, we’ll find someone who will.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
The advantage of outsourcing sales and marketing to third parties is that it takes a great deal of time and skill to become expert in the many technologies and sales & marketing programs required to grow revenue and even more time, skill and dogged determination to continuously do so over the long haul.
While we’ll admit that Sales Renewal is not the only firm that can do this, we truly believe we are fundamentally different because our commission compensations means we’re not motivated to amass billable hours. Instead, our motivation is to increase our commissions by growing your sales. And this alignment of economic interests leads to some very interesting situations … like firing ourselves.
JointSourcing in Action # 2: Sales Renewal’s Synergies & Cross Fertilization Kicks Up Client Sales
The Concord Flower Shop is doing very well in Concord MA, thank you very much.
Sales Renewal has been helping The Concord Flower Shop grow its sales since 2009, and thanks to its ongoing optimizing of the e-commerce site, it now captures a large share of the business of prospects searching for florists who deliver to Concord MA.
Having succeeded in Helen’s primary service area, Sales Renewal turned its attention to about a dozen nearby towns where the business also delivers. Sales Renewal chose to begin with the neighboring town of Acton, and-without charging for its research and time-created a new page for the ConcordFlowerShop.com website, specifically designed to attract natural search traffic and convert it to Acton-based flower sales (i.e., purchases from buyers who live in Acton, as well as from buyers who want flowers delivered there though they live, and are presumably searching from, somewhere else):
- To garner maximum traffic, Sales Renewal used best-practice search engine techniques to optimize the page for the carefully targeted keywords.
- To convert that traffic into as many buyers as possible, Sales Renewal used best-practice advertising techniques to set up the page along the lines of an advertising landing page.
Combining the two disciplines, Sales Renewal calls this type of web page design a Natural Search Landing Page.
Sales Renewal is perhaps unique in that, rather than being a specialist in just one narrow discipline, it operates as a Sales and Marketing General Contractor. In that role, its in-house experts regularly work with and oversee outsourced specialists, all cross-fertilizing each other’s thinking and planning on how to improve each client’s sales results.
In addition, Sales Renewal’s unique JointSourcingTM Solution sets it up to share the risks and rewards of its clients, so the company is heavily incentivized by its contributions to the client’s advertising expenditures and the commissions it earns on the client’s sales. As a result, Sales Renewal continually strives to produce long-term sales increases in cost-effective ways.
The new Natural Search Landing Page for flower business in the town of Acton went live in June, 2013.
After six months of activity, Sales Renewal’s analysts crunched the numbers and were happy to discover that The Concord Flower Shop‘s Acton-based business:
- Grew significantly faster than the company’s overall online sales.
- Ranked first in year-over-year sales growth, compared with its business in every other nearby town.
- Grew more than twice as fast as its business in the number two most-improved town.
Of course, no one can definitively prove the new Natural Search Landing Page caused these great results: because the page was totally new, there is no “before” to compare with the “after”. However, the circumstantial evidence is strong and persuasive.
Having proven the concept, Sales Renewal is now extremely busy putting up other carefully crafted Natural Search Landing Pages for The Concord Flower Shop and our other clients. We’ll report on those results as they become available.
JointSourcing Produces Win-Wins
The development and implementation of the technique that kicked up sales in the town of Acton for The Concord Flower Shop was a direct result of Sales Renewal’s unique and powerful JointSourcing Solution.
No conventional marketing service vendor – whether working in advertising, PR, social media, search engine optimization, content marketing, or anything else – would consider experimenting with a new marketing approach without securing payment for its billable time. Firms operating under conventional contracts have no incentive to invest the hours needed to conceptualize, develop, and fine tune brand new approaches to building business online. But JointSourcing automatically aligns Sales Renewal’s economic interests with those of each client.
The result is a series of win-wins that result from Sales Renewal’s innovative, cross-pollinated thinking and a willingness to take risks at its own expense.
JointSourcing continually drives Sales Renewal to consider new and better alternatives to existing online paradigms and best practices. When the chances of success look favorable, the people at Sales Renewal gladly break new ground and experiment with new techniques that offer the potential to help their clients succeed.
What Is JointSourcing?
JointSourcing is a unique business solution that effectively makes Sales Renewal a partner in a client’s sales and marketing success. As a partner, Sales Renewal charges significantly lower professional fees, and earns commissions on each JointSourcing client’s revenue. As part of the deal, Sales Renewal also pays a percentage of each client’s big ticket sales and marketing expenses, such as advertising and direct mail campaigns.
By design, JointSourcing automatically aligns Sales Renewal’s economic interests with those of its clients.
The natural result is a lighter burden on the client – with no need to select and oversee specialists, help in prioritizing and paying for sales and marketing expenses, and reduced demand for nuanced judgments and decision-making – combined with improved sales and marketing effectiveness.
Simply put, JointSourcing allows any company to “outsource” its sales and marketing functions to Sales Renewal, instantly adding a new layer of marketing intelligence a client organization can rarely equal. The company literally functions as a “general contractor” for all the client’s sales and marketing efforts, continually assembling and managing the specific team of “best-of-breed’ in-house and outsourced experts that each client needs to grow at the best possible pace for their budget.
JointSourcing puts Sales Renewal in position to oversee and control all the client’s sales and marketing service vendors, to replace poor performers with better ones, and to upgrade performance across the client’s entire marketing effort.
Under JointSourcing, the key members of the client company team have enhanced freedom and opportunity to remain focused on what they do best, while Sales Renewal takes full responsibility for developing the most successful sales and marketing strategies possible, cost-effectively driving up the client’s sales volume and profitability.