The COVID-19 pandemic clearly didn’t break our resolve.
Through the lockdowns and economic aftershocks, we’re still here, picking ourselves up and looking for ways to outmaneuver uncertainty.
To drive the business forward, brands will need to balance immediate needs and longer-term opportunities.
They will need strategies that support customers now and those that strengthen the brand to seize emerging opportunities and withstand new threats.
Sounds like an uphill task?
It probably is, but it’s the best way to ensure business continuity going forward.
We’ll focus on five strategies that can help businesses generate sales Post-Covid-19.
1. Review Your Marketing Strategy
The pandemic sparked tectonic shifts in supply and demand, which means pre-Covid-19 customer insights no longer hold true. Some sectors experienced tremendous growth while others dwindled.
Your strategy therefore should center on re-imagining your customers’ needs, customizing messages, and driving value-loaded solutions.
Here are some questions you should ask yourself:
- How do we stay ahead of the ever-evolving customer needs?
- How do we enable virtual selling processes that facilitate sales?
- What is our unique value proposition in the digital space?
- How do we best gather customer demand signals?
- What strategies can we implement to maximize productivity while keeping costs down?
Be a perpetual learner actively listening and analyzing customer feedback and your customer-facing teams too. Infuse your marketing campaigns with insightful KPIs from customer responses by segment or industry.
2. Make Data Your Friend
This goes beyond just having data in your system.
Rather, collecting and analyzing data to glean useful insights from it and put them into action.
Today’s businesses combine in-house data with data from third-party providers to have a 360-degree view of purchase intent by both existing and potential customers.
This allows them to mine for undetected needs, new propensity to buy, and scan for changes in demand across target industries.
Other benefits of using data include:
- Improved sales forecasting. Data analytics help you understand your business’s current performance and project future circumstances. You can then develop marketing campaigns that attract more customers and boost sales.
- Recommend products with accuracy. Studying customer patterns and search intent allows you to identify relevant products/services as well as upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
- Improved marketing segmentation. Targeting overly broad segments dilutes your offerings, making them irrelevant or insufficient even for those you’re actually targeting. Through data analytics, you can have a clear idea of which segments to focus on and hit them with granular level customized messaging for improved results.
- Boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. Analyzing data tells you which subject lines, messages, and formats are likely to generate responses. It also tells you the hours when your emails can receive the highest engagement.
3. Run Promotions
While sales promotions can help boost your top-line revenue, they are also great for heightening brand awareness and acquiring new customers.
Businesses leverage deals and offers to:
- Make profits. Sales promotions carry with them a sense of urgency, which means you’re likely to witness a significant increase in revenue.
- Speed up sales cycles. We all like a good deal and the fear of missing out can get prospects buying quicker.
- Retain customers. Deals and discounts may help keep customers happy and stop them from wandering off to the competition.
Here are some sales promotions types you can consider:
- Percentage discounts. These are extremely popular and generate high conversions. Customers can easily calculate the savings will make on the products/services they value.
- Buy One Get One. These are perfect for businesses that want to clear out stock or push slow-moving products.
- Free shipping. Rather than providing free shipping on select products, we recommend offering it on purchases above a certain amount. It minimizes confusion over how free shipping applies.
- Free trials. A key barrier to purchase is the prospect’s inability to have a feel of your solutions before purchase. Offering a 14-day or 30-day trial period allows them to experiment and see how your solutions fit.
4. Make Cold Calls
Do the words “tough” and “time-consuming” come to mind when you think about prospecting?
You’ve got to research leads, qualify, warm them up on social, and make cold calls. All these activities to secure appointments.
So rather than tire out your account executives with these tasks, why not partner with an SDR service company? They will handle the groundwork and pass on ready prospects to your team to close the deal.
Here are other top reasons you should outsource this strategy
- It saves time. Running an in-house is a huge investment. One that may undergo far too many trials before you come up with an effective system. Professional SDR teams, in contrast, have well-established strategies for identifying and reaching prospects.
- It’s cost-efficient. Hiring SDRs, buying and maintaining tools/software and other overheads can quickly pile into a substantial amount. With an SDR service company, you only choose the package that best suits your budget and the team gets to work.
- Results are measurable. Once you agree on the terms of hire, you can measure the results the company brings in using an ROI calculator. This way, you can know if the company is on track.
- Share insights about your customers. As the SDRs interact with your leads, they learn about their interests and preferences and can share valuable feedback on your offerings. For example, if many prospects can’t afford your offerings, the feedback may recommend price adjustment or targeting a different group.
5. Build Online Brand Authority
Online visibility is great, but combining it with online brand authority helps accelerate conversions for your company.
Building robust brand authority online requires two main things. Maintaining an active online presence to facilitate speedy responses at all times (particularly when there’s an issue) and offering interesting content that shows your expertise.
Here are some ways to build online brand authority:
- Be a credible source of information. Put together authoritative posts that touch on your industry and that of your target market. Ensure that this content is relevant to your buyers.
- Guest blog. To reach wider potential customers, find industry-relevant authoritative websites that you can contribute to. As audiences appreciate your expertise, they will start trusting your brand and frequent your website for more.
- Attend podcasts and host your own. You’ll be attracting that subset of your target market that prefers audio over text-based content. Use the forum to tackle industry trends, challenges, and other relevant topics.
- Showcase social proof. A quick way to raise your brand authority is through testimonials and positive reviews. They are proof that you exist, are trustworthy, and that your solutions are worth exploring.