Perhaps you aren’t looking for massive business expansion. Or, it could be that you’re just a start-up or small business and don’t have the capital to put toward digital marketing campaigns that could be expensive for a business of your size.
Even if you do have the capital to actually finance marketing strategies, you may prefer to have a larger existing customer basis before you invest a large amount of money in going after a new group of prospects. This way you can minimize the risk if the marketing strategies fail to provide the return on investment you’d hoped for.
Still, you want to increase sales so as to be able to build up to the point of having more usable capital for expanding your business.
Here are some low-risk ideas to increase sales over the coming year.
1. Create and Improve Upon a Social Media Presence
A 2016 study showed that, as of that year, 67% of time spent viewing retail vendors was spent on mobile devices.
Compare this with the fact that 90% of consumers have used social media to access retailers.
This means that, as a business in sales, if you don’t have a social media presence, there is a massive potential market going untouched.
It doesn’t mean that you have to use social media to overtly advertise. Rather, social media is a great tool to create brand awareness by entertaining and stimulating. This will leave its mark on the above-mentioned potential market and lead to greater consumer outreach.
2. Add Conveniences to Your Place of Business
Something less digital and more physical that can be done if you have a retail store or public company is to add conveniences and services that the community can use.
For example, have an ATM machine business come and set up an ATM at your store or company. In addition to making a little bit of extra side money, this minor added convenience can attract more people and lead to increased sales.
Making these small additions could again lead to greater community outreach as your business becomes more of a one-stop-shop through word-of-mouth.
3. Ask Your Existing Customers’ Ideas to Increase Sales for Your Business
This is one of the extremely low-risk ideas to increase sales for your business.
Getting customer feedback is a strategy that will improve your business relationships with both the customers you already have and those you wish to gain.
By asking your customers’ opinions and on your product or service, they will feel valued as a consumer. Reaching out to existing customers for feedback also gives you another chance to put your business in their minds.
Doing this gives you more information allowing you to improve upon your product or service so as to have a greater chance at appealing to future, potential customers.
4. Develop a Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs will vary for each business in what they can actually offer. Still, it’s a great way to make existing customers feel more valued and for potential customers to have a goal to work towards.
Similar to the previous idea of getting customer feedback, reaching out to customers about benefiting them through a loyalty program gives you just another excuse to contact them and remind them of your business.
5. Create Benefit-Based Content
No one knows more about your product or service than you do. No one knows how best it can benefit potential consumers than you either.
Use this fact to your benefit.
On your website or through email marketing, keep your customer basis informed about the actual benefits that your product or service can offer them.
By being considered in their eyes as an expert on such a subject, they’re more likely to turn to you when they actually encounter a problem creating a need for your product or service.
Increase Sales, Not Marketing Expenses
Each of these ideas to increase sales is something you can do to see your revenue over the coming year increase without having to see your marketing expenses only cancel this revenue out.
For more marketing tools and ideas to improve the success of your business, check out our blog.