Is your company losing money over sales and marketing strategies? How can you fix it and achieve your desired sales target? Do you want to take your revenue to the next level?
The journey to get more customers is often considered as stressful, time consuming and expensive. Getting more customers is not a simple task anyway but making some mistakes can make it even more difficult. If you feel that even after tremendous efforts by you and your team to get more customers, you have not achieved the desired result, it could be because you are making the same mistakes made by thousands of businesses worldwide. Every year companies are losing billions of dollars as their sales and marketing costs because of some simple mistakes.
In my understanding, there are three mistakes that are, by far, the most common and rectifying them can actually make sales a lot more fun, in addition to making the entire process easier, faster and cheaper. Read on to find out what these mistakes are…
1. Not identifying the target market
Did you know more than 50% of the money spent on online ads is wasted because it does not reach the right audience? There are more than 7.5 billion people on earth, not all of whom are your ideal customer. Also, you can’t reach out to every human and check if they want to buy your product/service. Take Apple for example. Apple is not just one of the largest players in the market but is also the most valued company in the world and even they have a market share of just about 20%. The point is, you don’t need the whole cake to achieve your sales goals, even a tiny slice of cake is enough to achieve your dream sales target. One of the mistakes that companies make is that they don’t identify their target market. They don’t know who wants their product/service and try to reach out to just about anyone and everyone. This is a very costly mistake. Imagine reaching out to a vegan and asking them to buy your delicious chicken wings. Your wings could be the best but you are asking the wrong person to try them out. Defining a target market is the first step to get more customers: it helps you reach out to a specific group of people who need your product/service. You need to define your target market by knowing exactly who can benefit the most from what you have to offer. You can do that by identifying the people who want your product/service to solve a problem they have and make a consumer persona of your ideal customer.
2. Choosing the wrong platform for promotion
Today companies get more customers from various platforms available both online and offline. Unlike before, where the sources were limited, companies now have the option to choose from a lot of platforms. It is crucial to choose the right platform to convert more prospects into customers at a profitable acquisition cost. Another common mistakes that companies make is to choose the wrong platform or choose every platform to promote their product/service. If you have ever experienced investing your time, money and other resources on a certain platform like trade shows, 3rd party websites (example yellow pages), billboards, flyers etc. and got no results, you know exactly what I’m talking about. This is why car sellers don’t sell cars on Amazon because on Amazon and not looking to buy cars. After you have defined your audience you need to know which platforms can be used to reach out to your target audience.
These are some questions you need to consider while selecting the right platform: Is your prospect available on that platform? What are the efforts and resources required to use that platform? And the return on investment from the platform? For example, the cost to acquire customers on Google is more than Facebook for some companies while for others Google is a cheaper option.
3. Communicating the wrong message
Now that you know who wants your product/service and you know where to find them, you need to figure out what are they interested in knowing about your product/service. This brings us to the third biggest marketing mistake that companies make. They either share the incorrect message or the right message at an incorrect time. Imagine if a prospect wants to know how dangerous sky diving is and all they hear about is a special offer for summer season. The person is not even convinced as yet to try sky diving, so to expect him/her in a discount offer is absurd? However, once the person has done his/her research and is now convinced to go on the most adventurous ride of his/her life, the special offer becomes an additional advantage and influences the buyer’s decision. Data suggests that price is the last factor which influences the buyer’s decision and yet in most cases the first thing salespeople inform. There is a company that was spending more than $10,000 every month on Facebook with zero revenue because the content was wrong. People purchase because they have a problem and want a solution. The correct method to communicate right is to identify the problem your prospect has and develop your content addressing their issue and how you can better assist them as compared to anyone else in the market.
Getting customers can be difficult but if you follow the above approach this journey will be a lot easier, faster and cheaper for your company. Key points to remember are to identify your target market, to choose the right channel to approach new prospects and to provide the information your prospect is looking for. The approach mentioned above is used by every successful company. This is how they get more customers and you can to by applying the same approach. Only get more customers but saves a tremendous amount of money, effort and time.