Limited sales and no revenue growth; what’s missing?
Entrepreneurial companies around the world often tend to focus most of their time and energy on creation of innovative products and solutions, securing resources, hiring the most competent teams, making operations smoother and more efficient, acquiring services of the best legal advisers, programmers and accountants, and introducing attractive brand identities. To top it off, they hire a remarkable sales team and say, “Go ahead and sell the products!” So what happens next?
The sales team responds to the call and knock at the doors all around the market. Their excitement soon fades away. After cold response from the market, the reality strikes them. They return, close the door behind them and ask “Why aren’t companies showing interest in our product? What is our product anyway? Why are we selling it? Whom are we selling it to?” Now what? Game over??
No. You just missed a key component! Marketing, effective marketing. In this modern world, marketing is a prerequisite to sales. If you want your sales and revenue growth to match the pace of the world, you need an effective marketing strategy.
Aligning sales and marketing strategies
The competition out there is fierce, the market is quite complex and difficult to penetrate into. , You need your sales process to be in perfect alignment with the marketing strategy. So how is sales and marketing linked? How can you use the modern marketing techniques to find your way around the potential clients in order to ensure sustainable revenue growth? You just need to clear your mind and follow a simple yet effective marketing plan to enhance your revenue growth in 2016.
The first step towards better marketing is to ditch your orthodox need-based marketing approach and devise a plan that’s manageable with your other operations. Most of the entrepreneurs make the mistake of using marketing and promotion whenever revenues and sales dry up. They create a business model which is more like a roller coaster. To ensure sustainable revenue growth in 2016, you need to abandon this feast or feminine model. An effective marketing plan generates revenue round the year and saves you from constant stress and anxiety of revenues drying up after every few months.
Build Your Marketing Tactics
An effective marketing strategy is based on a mix of tactics. A Johnny-one-note is never a good idea when you are looking for a marketing plan that can give a boost to your sales and revenues. A single marketing tactic is never effective to keep different prospects in your sales cycle.
There are three types of prospects in every market; cold, warm and hot. Cold prospects are unaware of your company, your products and your services while the warm prospects know about your products but rarely respond to them. The hot prospects are those who are close to acquiring your services and products. They’ve successfully passed through your sales cycle and are now looking for some closer contact and more information for partnership.
In your marketing plan, you need to have at least one marketing method for each type of prospect.
- For cold prospects you can use simple social media advertising or direct mail.
- For warm prospects you can use an email marketing campaign or use other methods like social media or mobile marketing.
- For hot prospects, you should be ready with power point presentations and face to face marketing and promotion of your products,
You need to figure out the best marketing method that not only is effective in attracting your prospects but also fits your company’s budget. It is not advisable that you spend a large chunk of your money on marketing and end up getting a small portion of it in revenue.
Put your plan on Paper
You always need to have a written strategic marketing plan along with target audience, timeline and expected results. Only then you can make your campaign successful by preparing everything beforehand. You can get the designs, posters, brochures and presentations prepared before the deadline and get all the material printed before you need them. A well devised plan is always the first step in the right direction. By writing it down you ensure that you never forget any crucial point and are always well prepared to go according to the plan.
Unless you are looking for investments (you need a well prepared and detailed document regarding your strategy and execution plan), you should keep your marketing strategy as simple and easy to follow as possible. You need to write down the following points in order to develop a marketing strategy to increase revenue growth.
Analysis
At least a page long, this section should provide a comprehensive summary of your company’s strengths, weaknesses, prospects and dangers. You can use it a bench mark when you review your company’s performance after few months.
The Target Audience
The target audience profile should be in there on the basis demographics like age, gender and annual income. If your target is some other business, you need to have a brief overview of that business as well. This section is quite invaluable when you sit down to analyze which marketing technique is effective to attract your prospects.
Clear Goals
It is the most important section. You need to write down your business’s marketing goals in a clear, bulleted form. The goals should be quantitative so that you can gauge the revenue growth easily. These goals act as the performance indicators.
Strategy and Tactics
In this section, outline your marketing strategy and the marketing tactics you plan to use attract your prospects. You need to have a clear timeline to ensure the production and sales goals are met.
Marketing Budget
Always put a limit to the marketing costs. Calculate the expected costs of the marketing methods you are planning to use and if they cross the limit you’ve put, rethink. You don’t need to get discouraged as there is always a way of marketing within a specified budget. It is only a matter of time before you find the right mix.
So, if you are not getting the desired increase I your revenue growth, you don’t need to get demotivated. There’s nothing wrong with your product or your team. You just need to remodel your marketing strategy. The sea is full of fish, you just need the right bait to catch them.
If you’d like to see if MEMO Marketing Group can help with your strategy, call us at 317-762-5398, fill out the form below, or email us at support@memomarketinggroup.com
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