Forward thinking is always important. Locating potential issues in your marketing campaigns and finding ways to fix them is one of your first steps to improving your return on investment, sales and brand reach. Some marketing techniques age better than others, and that’s to be expected as the world moves forward, technology changes and new channels for marketing emerge.
Here are 5 marketing techniques you can reinvent to refresh your approach with the aim to improve customer engagement and sales:
1. Rethink Paper and Print
There are fewer and fewer spaces for your to utilise print marketing correctly. The overall technique hasn’t changed too much, but to really get a better ROI from your print marketing, businesses need to innovate and find better places to advertise their printed materials, as well as more effective ways to design the graphics on their printed marketing materials.
Adding in things like coupons and discounts to printed materials is one of the ways business can improve the probability of consumers taking notice and acting upon their flyers or other hard copy materials.
2. Reimagine Cold Calling
Specifically, international and interstate cold calling is what needs to be improved for businesses to get better returns from their calls. This means adding a line that shows a local number when calling consumers to reduce the number of ignored calls. Consumers simply don’t want to answer a call from thousands of kilometres away in a city where they have no relatives or any reason for them to answer a call from there.
More than 80% of sales calls go to voicemail.
There are now ways you can offer virtual numbers and locations for businesses to be able to contact consumers on a local number that is able to help reduce the number of ignored calls and help to create a higher sense of trust during the call.
3. Utilise More In Depth Follow-ups
Don’t underestimate the power of follow-up surveys and questions that you ask consumers. These are often overlooked by businesses, and the businesses who do remember to ask them, don’t collect enough information to make it worthwhile anyway.
Look to find all the ins and outs of why a consumer purchased a product with you, how they used that product and whether they liked it. These are the types of questions that will help your business develop new versions of the product. Questions about how a consumer found a product and where they first saw it should be included.
4. Make Map Friendly Websites
It’s not uncommon for customers to search online for a business before they purchase from it, or visit it in person. It’s no longer just about having your contact information and hours on your website home page, for businesses with a physical location, it’s worth including a map and detailed location information to help consumers find exactly where the business is.
Using location-based tags and making sure your business is listed on Google My Business helps ensure your business will be easy to find as well as helping it to rank in local search results. This means your business can appear on the Google Maps results page when customers are searching for your product or service in your location.
5. Update and Add to Your Pricing Structure
Consumers care more than ever about the quality and exclusivity of products. Businesses can use this to their advantage by adding other products or services specifically to fill any pricing gaps and even make the higher end versions of a product more attractive. This may even mean deliberately making a sub-par product to make your higher-end products look better.
Larger companies in the tech world have begun using this pricing style in their favour and it’s driven the price of smartphones and tablets up to the point where we’d never think could be possible. But the response has been more sales than ever.
The Bottom Line
Sometimes you don’t know its broken until you fix it. That seems to be the consensus for most businesses and their marketing. Returns from marketing may seem high, but they could be much higher if they were updated or reinvented to suit today’s market.
Don’t leave your marketing campaigns and activities stagnant, the consumer market is constantly moving and evolving – so too should your marketing techniques.
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