Increasing the amount you spend on advertising and digital marketing should increase your number of sales enquiries. But is that the best way of doing it? Wouldn’t it be better if you could achieve the same outcome without spending a penny more on advertising and achieve a longer lasting benefit?
Before signing off additional ad spend take some time to evaluate how well your current processes work. You could be letting sales opportunities you have already paid for slip between your fingers.
A good place to start is with existing client relationships. Are you (in the nicest possible way) extracting all the value you could from these?
What is the average lifespan of your customer relationships? Maybe with a different approach and better customer support processes you could extend their average longevity. Instead of buying your products or using your services for one year, what about if it was five or more?
Measure the average lifespan of customer relationships, identify the main reasons for defection, and you have a focus for improvement and a vital business metric you can track.
Understand What ‘Loyalty’ Means
Beware of the word loyalty. Customers will remain loyal only for as long as the service and convenience you offer is strong enough to maintain their preference.
Maintaining preference comes from ensuring you have a reliable, efficient product or service. Have a process to manage the relationship after the sale is made. Follow up, give them information for free, give them expert knowledge and advice, make them trust you as a brand so they continue prefer you to the other alternatives available.
Permission to Upsell
That level of trust removes barriers to upselling or cross-selling other services or products – or at the very least it makes them easier to hurdle. Unless the pitch is coming from a source we trust there’s an automatic resistance to any attempt to sell. In fact, our brains are incredibly good at filtering out anything that calls for mental effort unless there’s a clear advantage – most advertising can be easily ignored unless it is a product or service that we are interested in.
Trust and familiarity based on good experiences allow your repeat preference and upselling messages to pass through the filter.
The other area to investigate is how your advertising and marketing spend is directed. There’s a huge difference in effectiveness between generalised messages designed to reach many people, and pin-point contextual messaging and campaigns based on a more focused audience and clear intent.
The Price Premium
Things are only expensive if the value doesn’t match the price. Add value, build trust, and your service or product becomes less-price sensitive. Maybe they can buy it somewhere else cheaper, but is it worth the risk of suffering a poorer outcome or service?
There are many ways that virtually any business can increase enquiries and sales without automatically jumping onto buying more advertising. We’ve given a few examples here. And remember, the value of the effort and investment you put into customer relationships and convenience will go much further than the equivalent ad spend.
To find out more about the topics discussed in this article, please contact us today on 01823 429339 or email info@accessperformance.co.uk.
