Get More Sales for Your Small Business with These Simple Research Tips
You have a marketing plan [3] in place. You have a website and an active web presence. The traffic to your site isn’t exactly a stampede, but it’s respectable and slowly growing from month to month. You even have a Facebook profile page, a Twitter account, a digital marketing firm that updates your posts and a professional writer who manages your blog.
But for some reason, these efforts aren’t doing much for the only success metric that really matters: your sales. What gives? People enjoy your site, they read your blog, they even “like” you on Facebook... So why aren’t they buying your product?
Without knowing your product or service, we can’t tell you what’s holding you back or how to get more sales. But we can tell you how to find out. Start by taking these simple steps:
Get More Sales: Identify Your Needs and Weaknesses
1. Take a step back for a minute and broaden your view. Make sure that your slow sales don’t just represent a seasonal or cyclical slump. Many new business owners [4] have to complete at least one full annual cycle, and often two or three, before they start recognizing and anticipating regular seasonal shifts in consumer habits.
2. Re-evaluate your target audience. Sometimes a target audience changes with time, and sometimes marketers incorrectly identify the audience in the first place. Are you really selling to teenagers? Or are you selling to their parents? Are you really selling to cat owners? Or are you selling to their spouses and friends? Study your data carefully, and if you see an error, don’t be afraid to make some changes, refocus your current campaign, or shift your brand message.
3. Gather data constantly. If your slow sales are simply due to a design flaw in your product, find out so you can make an easy fix. If your customers love your product but are turned off by some other element of your brand, find out. Knowledge is power. Reach out for help if you need to-- This is how research and outside marketing firms earn their pay.
4. Price can have a powerful impact on consumer decision making. But be careful—pricing is an art and a science. Sometimes customers are actually driven away because a product is too inexpensive, instead of the other way around. Again, you can resolve this with careful research, surveys, and constant contact with your target market.
Have you ever risen successfully out of a sales slump? If so, tell us how. Share your tips and advice in the comments below!