11 Ways to Generate Sales for your Small Business

Let’s face it, finding a new customer to buy or patronize your products or services is an important aspect of the sales process. It takes a considerable amount of effort. 

It involves wearing different hats, dealing with sales, marketing, and understanding revenue, taxes, and corporate compliance.

Generating more sales for your small business also involves having positive interactions with your customers every now and there. In the end, it takes a perfect toll on your business.

While this may be tough — to some extent on some people — if your own goal is to generate more sales for your business, then it’s important you figure out which sales tactics will be effective on your target customer.

Thus, having a strong and dedicated sales team on your side can make a very big difference.

But notwithstanding, you might want to combine the following sales tips and strategies to gain more prospective customers who will patronize and buy your products.

1. Build a Sales Funnel

The easiest way to grow your business, in no time, is to build a sales funnel. Word is, if you have no sales funnel, you are making a grand mistake. 

You can use sales funnels to automate your small business. It will help your business grow and scale through hurdles easily and quickly. 

While all these wouldn’t come on a platter of gold, it involves some front-end work. But, once all the processes are put in place, then what is left is smooth sailing.

It’s worth stating outright from the word go that some of the prominent and top digital marketers warn that all sales funnel builders require careful conceptualization before it is created. 

You don’t commit your small business to all tools that parade themselves as a sales funnel software, they might be missing out on the important features that you need.

Nonetheless, out of the leading funnel builders in the digital marketing industry, ClickFunnels has proven to be the best and most trusted of them all.

With it, your funnel stands the chance of having a series of magnificent marketing assets that include social media campaigns, customizable landing pages, email lists, etc.

So, therefore, whether it is a high-ticket coaching or a free-plus-shipping offer funnel, what is important is to design an automated selling machine to grow and increase your business sales.

2. Build a Simple Checkout Page

Optimizing a checkout page on your business’s official website will ensure that your customers get the perfect shopping experience they wanted.

It will equally guide them through the cart all in a bid to ensure that the sale is completed.

Functionality, trust, and streamlined design are always instrumental in making sure online shoppers don’t abandon their picked items in the carts or take the business elsewhere.

This is achievable with the help of a pop-up instruction asking them if they want to keep shopping or ready to check out.

Research shows that 68% of online shoppers — on average — abandon their carts, except with an actionable checkout page.

This means, with a simple designed and actionable checkout dashboard, your online market store conversion rate will increase and thus, boost sales.

What then is a better way to do this? 

Well, the answer is not far-fetched. Install the Thrivecart plugin — it’s one of the best shopping carts and checkout builders in existence — and let it put a colorful and actionable checkout box on your web page.

It will entice your visitors to take action, encourage them to complete the sale, and eventually checkout.

3. Build Social Proof

Another proven way to generate sales for your small business online is by building social proof. It will play a vital role in your prospective customers’ purchase decisions.

People book hotels based on feedback or reviews they read, customers try out new restaurants because of the class of people they see inside and buy products based on the various testimonials they heard.

So when your customers are impressed with the products or services you are rendering, they will always watch out for you, and even guide the decision-making process of others towards patronizing you.

What’s more, the social proof statistical standpoint has confirmed that these marketing tactics worth all the time and effort you may put in making it work.

It will boost your sales conversation rate up to 34%, simplify your audience buying decision by 85%, help you build trust with your customers, add 40% credibility, and a Coca-Colahost of other things to your advantage.

On this note, try using positive social proof of your business in the form of reviews, testimonials, and trust icons.

With it, you are helping your potential customers to make decisions and feel confident about the choice they want to make.

Put simply, with social proof, you can influence your customers’ feelings and make them purchase your product thus, generating more sales for the business.

4. Use Social Media to Boost Sales

We are living witnesses to the social media business raves and you wouldn’t agree less with me that advertising online is akin to a financial engine, a propelling force, that sustain all social media. 

That is to say, if you can advertise and leverage on all the social media platforms, your business brand will reach thousands of your target audience in a short time, thereby boosting your sales.

Facebook began its ads programs in 2007, and the ads tool has positively increased the ways and manners advertisers reach their target audience. 

While the world has fondly grown into the idea of seeing ads popping up on their Facebook wall and pages. Truth is, it enhances meaningful connections with a target audience.

Although many people will skip the ads in their feeds, they still end up seeing them, which leads to familiarity, and in the end, business transactions.

Instagram added ads in 2013, but ever since the introduction of its marketing tools, it has been used to impact thousands of products and services and drive several business brands into their promise land.

Specifically, for your business to make enough money advertising and selling on Instagram, you’ll have to celebrate the Instagram growth services to boost your followers.

And one of the ideal tools for the job is Stellation Media, this service can give you thousands of real followers that will impact your business growth in all ramifications. (See a detailed Stellation Media Review here). There are other tools like Nitreo and Kicksta.

What’s more, LinkedIn launched its paid advertisements service in 2005, and ever since then, the platform has proved to be great for both business promotion and brand awareness.

At this juncture, you must note that for you to enjoy the instrument of social media in boosting your business sales, there’s a need for you to make some of the social media automation tools your friend.

The bottom line is, a smart social media marketing strategy can contribute immensely to your business sales growth without moving many needles.

5. Leverage Influencers

Influencers can be the perfect spokesperson for your small business enterprise and an ideal way to get to your target audience thereby improving your brand awareness.

Categorically, influencers are a set of people who have huge followers or fan bases on social media. 

And they are used to helping business owners market their brand in a bid to increase their sales incentives.

Therefore, leveraging them can be an effective model of advertising as well as a more authentic channel to engage with your target audiences.

However, finding an ideal social media influencer to partner with as a new business owner can be tricky sometimes. 

You need to be mindful of the kind of engagement shoutouts your brand gets once it’s being shared on their page.

And you need to be on the good side of them always even if you no longer have business with them. You wouldn’t want to mess around with an influencer. They’re powerful.

Take, for instance, Cristiano Ronaldo is a prominent footballer and Instagram influencer with thousands of million followers. He made a gesture of pushing away Coca Cola in favor of table water in an interview during Euro 2020.

But unfortunately for Coca-Cola, that action of Ronaldo pushing away their product went viral on social media thereby making them lose over $4 billion within 24 hours.

Such is the power of influencers in persuading their fan base to take action on any brand they acknowledged. They drive engagement, increase conversion rate, set cultural trends, etc.

In the same vein, the best way to find influencers who will be willing and ready to promote your business is to leverage a tool to help.

One of these marketing platforms is Heepsy. It has over 11 million influencers under its nose with easy tools to navigate your search in a bid to choose an influencer that can command the most of your target audience.

6. Run Social Media Challenge and Giveaways

Hosting contests on social media outlets and doing giveaways is one of the great ways you can adopt to create awareness for your brand and also generate sales for the business. 

The rationale behind this is that once the contests end, you will have the opportunity to keep marketing to the audience who happily subscribed to your social page hoping to win a prize one day.

Note that not winning a prize sometimes can be discouraging but fortunately enough, there’s an easy way out of it. Always assure your target audience that there are big prizes they can win. 

Go to the length of sending your customers who have won nothing private messages telling them that they’ve won a prize — out of the moon. 

The runner-up prize could be a gift card to your store with the purchase of a few items to trigger the prize won. This means they don’t take the advantage of shopping for free while they’re in your store. 

After all, you intend to strike the balance of satisfying your customers in other to gain massive emotional marketing statistics and also make additional incentives for yourself. In the end, everybody won!

While they’ll be happy to trigger the prize release clause and become a prize winner, you will be busy generating extra sales for your business too.

7. Provide an Excellent Customer Experience

Since everything is now easier than you can buy anything online ranging from robots to salt, it is no surprise that there are going to be many players in the online marketplace trying to take their share of the pie. 

And this is one of the reasons why being steps ahead of your competitors by putting up an excellent customer experience on your official website will put your business in good stead.

In the same vein, website speed can leave an unforgettable experience in the mind of your visitors. Most especially, if it loads slowly, they may never come back to your page again.

Let me expose you to some crazy numbers that a delay for seconds in your website page load time can cause to your business: 

  • You will have 11% fewer few page views;
  • 7% loss in your conversion rate; and
  • 16% decrease in your prospective customer satisfaction.

This is why it is important to use good and standard web hostings for your website. Even if you are in doubt on which to trust, there are many web hosting companies with free trials to know what you are committing to.

All in all, even if your business establishment is not as big as a company with lots of resources and wherewithal funds to leverage on ingenious website user interface, page speed, and all, you can impress your audience with valuable content. 

8. Create Content Online

Another proven way to generate sales for your small business is to create unique and engaging content online for your target audience to consume.

Without any doubt, creating content online — whether written, audio, visual, or audio-visual — can have a positive impact on your business for good.

By providing engaging and valuable content online, you increase your chances of having the content shared to a countless number of your audience size and as such, generating sales for your business. 

The main question now is what category of content are you going to invest your resources in? Is it video content or written content, audio or audio-visual? 

If you have the resource, pull it on them all to create brand-enriching content that will let your business brand get noticed online.

So whether it is blog content that you will be leveraging your time and efforts on or video content, note that creating online content that provides enormous value to your target audience is all that matters. 

You can, however, use tools like CoSchedule’s Headline to create headlines or blog titles that will attract high click-through rates and video animation tools like Viddyoze to create an amazing explainer video. 

Lastly, if you create the right content for the right audience, you will be able to connect with your potential customers in an ideal way, build trust and help keep them informed about your new products.

9. Write Better Copy

There have been a lot of conflicting arguments in respect of e-commerce copywriting. Although everyone agreed to the fact that copywriting is an important sphere of selling online.

To some experts, keeping your landing pages very short is the key so far you can create an immediate sense of “FOMO” in your bid to drive sales.

While others opined that the devil lives in the details, therefore a better copy should be able to go a long way in painting a clearer picture of why your customers need your product.

To be sincere, most of the arguments they canvased are purely on anecdotal experience as well as decades-old behavioral psychology. The truth is, if your copy is poor, your sales will also be poor.

Accordingly, copywriting is akin to a herculean task to some people, so they are always looking for copywriting tools that will make things look even a bit easier for them.

In case you are one of them, Copysmith is a copywriting tool to write better copy. Yes, it is one of the lesser-known AI content generators that could provide you with an efficient sales copy.

In the end, for you to be successful in any online business, your communication skill must be strong, and you must be able to use persuasive and powerful words to sharpen your sales copy.

10. Start a Blog

You might have heard this umpteen times but blogging still works. Most especially, in this era of content marketing.

Informatively, blogging has grown into one of the most reliable and effective means to market a brand. People make money blogging without stress now.

Blogging is cost-efficient, simple, and also a perfect way to drive huge traffic to one website unlike the conventional interruptive marketing strategy like email blasting. 

Opting out of the magnificent blogging phenomenon means the business is not ready to establish a relationship with its target audience, and in this age and day, that is nothing but short-sightedness.

Starting a blog can be advantageous to your ministry. It can help you generate massive leads. The content you publish on the site can bring you new visitors as well as potential customers.

That is to say, sharing valuable content or information is a perfect way to get potential customers to trust your business brand, and with blogging, you can establish yourself as an expert in the industry.

When you publish and share articles consistently about the latest trends in the industry, before you know it, visitors will start to see your site as a remarkable source of insight. 

11. Hire an A-Team

Regardless of whether your leadership skills are exceptional or not, it’s mission-critical you find an excellent team for your business. 

While hiring the right men for the job is not that simple. It comes with a lot of sacrifices; time, effort, energy, etc.

But your ability to carefully employ a team of A-players that know their onions means your business establishment is bound to succeed in a very short time.

Besides, employees that are motivated naturally to contribute their quota and serve their potential clients well will be easier to lead compared to those with little or no interest in giving a rock-star performance.

You’ll also agree with me that many hands make work easier, and there is beauty in joint brainstorming, shared creativity, resources, and strength to accomplish tasks and goals as a team.

More so, you need to hire people that are good at collaboration. Collaboration is in the top three important skills every employee must possess for future success.

Various offices and workplace collaboration statistics 2020 revealed that most companies whose employees collaborate and work together do stick and grow together as such, increasing the business productivity.

If you’re looking for a content writing agency to increase your sales, then you should check out Content Keen Agency.

Conclusion

At this juncture, you must have understood from the foregoing that your sales team is the best resource for building your business’s client base and generating sales. 

It was also mentioned that your present customers are the best alternative to increase your sales and as such, they should be the main focus of your business marketing efforts. 

Since they’ve already used your products and services once, they now trust your brand enough to buy your solutions. 

So if you can provide them with top-notch customer service, there’s a heavy tendency that they are going to patronize you again and again, which will help you to generate more sales.

About the author

Rahul Yadav is a versatile digital marketing consultant from Delhi who offers exceptional web and digital services worldwide.

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