Tag: sales efforts

What Are Marketing Communication Tools?

Marketing communication tools are a complex and perplexing process that uses several tools to help you generate brand awareness and serves as the fulcrum for your sales efforts. These tools are avenues and diversified programs that help reach out to the desired audience most effectively. However, you need not be proficient in all of them as you can consult marketing and communication firms for this endeavor.

Here are the different marketing communications tools that you should know.

Advertising

Among the most effective communication tools of marketing is advertising. It can be paid and unpaid. Now, in the context of digital and intern0et marketing, it includes SEO and PPC. What is unique about advertising is that it is wide-reaching and is excellent for propelling the revenue streams for startups and small-scale businesses. It is especially effective for those dry on funding. Advertising caters to above-the-line marketing, making it ideal for brands with less exposure or small target audiences.

Sales Promotion

It caters to promoting your products, services, and solutions. The idea encourages direct interactions with your customers. Hence, sales promotion is all about making your audiences feel cared for and heard. Using this tool, you can endorse your products and services directly to consumers. It is essential for garnering brand loyalty and generating lifetime value from customers. Free samples, testers and tasters, gift vouchers, discounts, and deals such as cashback offers are some of the profound examples of sales promotions.

Email Marketing

Another great tactic to interact with prospects and generate leads is email marketing. It helps build a direct customer base to who you can reach out with relevant messaging. By tapping on their inbox, a company can create a direct relationship, which can be leveraged for future sales. Therefore, it is an excellent way to fuel traffic to your company website and raise brand awareness.

Newsletter subscription

An ancillary of email marketing, newsletters help you send personalized (or gated) content right into their inboxes. It works as an excellent cue for redirecting the prospects towards the sales funnel pages and acts as an effective option for driving brand engagement.

Public Relations (PR)

PR is a brilliant way for improving or revamping your brand image and reputation in the market. The term Public Relations involves maintaining relationships with influential people for attaining business growth. Now, with that said, affiliate and influencer marketing are excellent public relations tools to communicate with the target audience.

However, the trick is to use the avenue at the right time and with the appropriate people. Your sales numbers will grow exponentially from here on. What is unique about this one is that you need not spend highly on public PR campaigns. It is a reliable tool to use when you are short on funds since publicity is not the only portion of PR.

Social Media

The standout aspect of social media is that everyone is on it. So, it already opens your business to an extensive base of prospects and target audience members. Also, it allows you to get creative, use humor and wit, and change the narrative. It is especially effective when your brand faces negative publicity or a catastrophe. A standout aspect of social media is that you can promote your products and services using videos (including UGC or User-Generated Content), ads (SEO and PPC), photos, and other types of content. So get innovative and make it count.

Mobile applications

Mobile phones are practically indispensable today. They give the competitive edge to communicate with the target audience from anywhere and at any time. Therefore, an excellent way to get mobile marketing right is to create a mobile application for your brand. However, if your audiences are to make purchases through their mobile phones, you need to integrate the application with payment gateways. Nonetheless, the tool aids in reaching out to an extensive customer base.

Podcasts

Podcasts are another way of driving engagement with the target audience. The nature of the medium is that it is interactively and informatively visual. Podcasts are compelling when shot in video format. Secondly, it involves discussions and debates about new topics and trends, informing and educating the public about any new development or innovation in the field. Podcasts essentially keep your viewers (and listeners) engaged for a prolonged period, thus increasing brand exposure.

Meme marketing

Humour and wit diffuse things and garner tremendous attention. That is the power of memes today. Having emerged as the only content form as permanent over the years, over 60 percent of the 3 billion social media users communicate using memes. If you want to get the word out instantly, memes to the rescue.

Memes are unique as they create instant relatability and recall. They typically apply across contexts and situations. One meme has many meanings as it involves a lot of subtexts. From a marketing perspective, memes are cheap, shareable, and are a take on the current trends. While regular marketing graphics offer 5 percent traction on social media platforms, memes provide around 60 percent.

Conclusion

Each of these marketing communications tools is powerful and effective. However, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. To make the most of your marketing communications, you should integrate multiple avenues and subscribe to an omnichannel communications strategy.

How Marketing Can Feed Into A Company’s Sales Efforts

While the majority of firms take advantage of marketing strategies and sales efforts, they can often fail to realize how vital they can be to the business. This can often result in the company underperforming in a variety of notable ways, with many entrepreneurs not knowing why this may be the case.

Though marketing is typically geared toward generating awareness of a particular brand or product, quite a significant number of people might not see how it factors into the customer purchase journey. While there are a few distinct ways that this will be seen, such as enhanced visibility, there are a variety of other reasons why marketing helps the overall sales process.

Despite this, many companies will engage in marketing activities for the sake of marketing. Typically, this will result in an underwhelming performance across these efforts which could eventually have a domino effect on sales. While inadequate marketing efforts may often mean poor sales, the opposite is also the case, with high-quality advertising strategies feeding directly into the sales funnel.

There are a few notable ways that this can be seen, especially with the holiday season coming up. As a result, it could be crucial for the majority of businesses to utilize a high-quality digital marketing professional to ensure that they maximize their sales efforts. This will predominantly be seen in a few specific ways.

Generate More Leads

Generating more leads for a business will be one of the more obvious ways that marketing will help the sales process. However, strategies will focus much more on ensuring that these are qualified leads rather than passive viewers. This is primarily because the majority of sales teams will look for leads that are likely to buy, rather than simple website visitors.

As such, advertising professionals look to identify a firm’s ideal customers and will adjust their marketing approach accordingly. One of the core aspects of this will be to work closely with the sales team to determine who the ideal customer is and what their interests will be.

This should result in the marketing and sales teams creating a detailed buyer persona, which will then dictate many of their activities. By doing so, they should be able to ensure that they’re targeting potential customers who have an active interest in a company’s niche and who will be much more likely to buy.

The marketing team will then be able to qualify these leads and pass them on to sales staff at an appropriate time.

Align Content With The Buying Cycle

What many entrepreneurs might not realize is that marketing strategies can be used to push potential customers through the buying cycle, with this being done in a variety of ways. The majority of this will be done by capitalizing on industry trends and information.

By taking advantage of this data, advertising professionals will be able to create content that targets customers at various stages of the buying cycle. There will be a variety of strategies that a professional will use to gather and capitalize on such data, although the focus will also be to maximize sales as much as possible.

By using this industry-specific data, the majority of marketing professionals will be able to identify what stage of the buying cycle a potential customer is in and craft content accordingly. This will predominantly be done through creating the content that a prospect is looking for and which includes all of the information they need to make a purchase.

While this is typically done by a marketing team, a firm’s sales professionals will also be able to take part in the content’s distribution, although this will vary depending on a firm’s needs. Should this be the case, then everybody involved will need to know what their responsibilities are which will ensure consistent and high-quality results.

With the various benefits that a high-quality marketing strategy can have on sales, it can often be vital for a firm to take advantage of them. While this can typically be an overwhelming process for many people, it’s something that a qualified marketing professional should be able to do with ease.

This will especially be the case with the holiday season coming up, which can often be one of the larger sales periods for many firms. As a result, utilizing a high-quality advertising strategy can make quite a substantial difference in how well a company’s sales perform during this time.