Ten Marketing Tactics to Boost Sales

1. Strategic Partnerships: Forming collaborative relationships with complementary businesses and friendly competitors can significantly boost your sales. Your willingness to sub contract, take on overflow, provide referrals, and support businesses with a similar customer base could easily add another 10% to your sales.

2. Info Sessions: Sometimes business owners get lucky and people come to know about them without them having to put a lot of effort into marketing. If sales are stagnant, or if you don’t have a very diverse customer base, then you need to consider ways to reach more people. Information sessions, open house events as well as lunch and learns are great ways to accomplish this. Make sure to capture contact information and offer prizes or gifts to participants. They will need incentive to arrive and a show of appreciation for staying.

3. Speaking Engagements: Another great way to get more leads for your business is to offer to speak to members of a relevant association or conference delegates. Offer your audience a discount or sample if they leave their business card with you. The cards give you contact information for following up later.

4. Social Media Engagement: Social media should not be all you do to attract business. It is only one spoke in the marketing wheel. Start building your following and engage in online conversations with people. Hold contests, ask for opinions, run polls, share other people’s content and become known for being helpful online.

5. Marketing Content: Social media managers and digital marketers need great content. Great content is interesting, informative and worth sharing. The more shares, the better. That’s called free advertising. Make sure your content is properly branded so that anyone who sees it can understand what you do, visit your website and contact you.

6. Contests: Engagement is always a good thing, and contests are a great way to get people involved in giving your business exposure. Think up ways to leverage the influence of your current following/ customer base to generate more leads, and by all means, make it fun!

7. Trade Shows: There are three ways to work a trade show. One is to have a booth set up in the vendor’s gallery. The other is to visit the other vendors in the gallery and schmooze with them and their customers. The third way is to leverage your subject matter expertise and become a guest speaker at a conference or event. Ideally, you want to do all three. If you have a booth set up, then make sure your presentation draws lots of attention. Make noise, hold regular information sessions and put yourself out there as much as possible.

8. Free Trials/ Samples: This old standby works very well, especially when combined with human interaction. Talking to people as they take a sample allows you to give them a mini sales pitch to reinforce the goodness of your product.

9. Companion Products: Think about what other products could complement your main offering. The more you add on or up-sell, the more your sales will naturally increase.

10. Bundle Overstock Items: If you purchase companion products from a liquidator, then you can offer a really good deal on product bundles, or just enjoy a bigger margin. The choice is yours. Make sure the bundle is attractive both visually and financially. 

Making money is fun, and even more fun when you can be a bit creative in your approach. If you’re getting bored with your business and want to inject a little life into your sales and marketing, then trying any of these tactics should generate the results you need. If you need support beyond that, then please contact me through my website.