We’re happy to welcome Petra Odak from BetterProposals to talk to us about making the first sale. The folks at BetterProposals have developed software that helps their clients send more professional proposals, impress their clients, and get paid in less time. Let’s hear them out!
Congratulations! You started a new brand, worked hard on your products and services and you’re ready to launch. All you need now is to sell. If you’re not sure how to reach people, spread the word about your life-changing products, and convince everyone that they want and need to buy from you, here are a few tips.
It helps if you already have a target audience. If that is not the case, don’t worry. Just think about who you created the product or service for and who do you think would most benefit from them.
Over time, you’ll need to adjust your audience, but by then, you’ll have analytics that can help you zero in on the characteristics of the people that are most likely to buy from you.
Rely on content marketing
The best thing a new business can do is create content. This could mean starting a blog, opening up profiles on social media, or even starting a YouTube channel. Choose the platform you feel most comfortable with and start posting content that helps you tell your story.
Starting a blog will not give you instant results, but over a longer period of time, it can become your best source of revenue. It lets you create valuable content that can help your search engine rankings. Over time, your blog can help you become an authority in your industry.
If you’re more inclined to use social media, make sure to create content specifically for one platform. Don’t lose sight of the community aspect of social media. Connect with your niche and make sure to comment on other people’s posts and answer any questions in the comment section.
It is important to have a strong content strategy in place before you start posting. Start with brand awareness. That means creating content that introduces your audience to your products and services, as well as your brand.
Source: Pexels
At this stage, your content, be it blogs or social media posts should be short, easy to digest, and light. You can incorporate humor at this stage, just make sure you don’t bomb people with too much information or industry jargon.
If you have an interesting USP, this is where you’ll explain to people how your product or service can help them with a problem they maybe didn’t even realize they could solve. A great example of this is a showerhead that can help with your water pressure.
People who have a problem with the water pressure in their apartment can feel defeated from the start, thinking that they would need to talk to all the apartment owners in order to even start the process of fixing the communal problem of the water pressure.
Therefore, they are not going to look for a localized solution, if they are not aware of the fact that it exists. So if they Google “bad water pressure” to see how others have dealt with it, and see that there’s a showerhead that can help them, they’ll want to know more about it.
At this stage, you only need to introduce your product or service and its biggest benefit. Even if you’re selling a product that doesn’t need explaining, such as lipstick, you still need to tell people why they should buy from you instead of your competitors.
Use video in your marketing campaigns
Organic content will only get you so far and if you’re starting out, you may not have a large audience yet. That’s why it’s important to reach people through paid advertising. We recommend social media ads for those of you that are just starting out.
Source: Unsplash
Over the last few years, new brands that exploded in popularity often used video ads as their first marketing campaign, like Aviation gin, Calm and more. Video has been on a rise over the years, proving to yield more engagement than other types of content shared on social media. Research shows that 72% of customers prefer to learn about a product through a video.
Use that to your advantage and create fun, engaging videos that show your products and services in the best way possible, all while not feeling too promotional.
Also if you are looking to schedule your posts for social media ads you can use SocialBee.
Send free samples to influencers
Brands often have a love-hate relationship with influencers. However, their power of persuasion can not be underestimated. They are a huge force in the marketing industry and they bring in results.
When branching out into influencer marketing, you need to find the right opinion-makers, while also casting a wide net. The bigger the influencer, the smaller the chances that they’ll promote your brand for free.
That’s why you need to reach out to small and medium-sized influencers and find a way to stand out from the rest of the PR packages they get. When doing outreach campaigns like these, there is no room for modesty. You need to be your biggest fan and truly sell your brand to these influencers, be it through email, social media, or even your business phone.
If you have a really positive experience with an influencer and their audience, you can start a partnership with them by creating a promo code they can share with their followers and use it to drive up even more sales.
You can even start an affiliate program, and offer influencers to promote your brand for a cut of the sales made through their affiliate links.
If you’re reluctant to free samples, you could even try a barter. For example, this particular treehouse in Transylvania offered a free stay to few Instagram influencers. What happened next? Those influencers tagged themselves in the cabin and the account ended up having 15.000+ followers and clients coming pouring in. And let’s not forget tons of impressive photos.
Create a giveaway
Everybody loves gifts! Creating a giveaway is a sure way to reach a large audience and get people interested in your brand. Give them a chance to win a free product or service (make sure to choose something worth competing) by creating simple, easy-to-follow rules. Ensure your followers’ trust by making the process of selecting a winner clear from the start.
These types of content usually get a lot of attention, because people like to tag others and share giveaways in order to inform their friends of a chance to win something.
If you want your contest to stand out, try posting a picture and ask for the most creative caption, ask your followers what was the worst gift they ever received, or create a digital scavenger hunt. The possibilities are endless.
Offer a buy-now-pay-later solution
Seeing how you have a fairly new store, your customers may be hesitant to complete their purchase, simply because they don’t know if they can trust you yet. A great way to ensure their trust is with a “buy now, pay later” solution.
You can integrate Afterpay, Splitit, or any other service that lets your customers pay for products and services in multiple installments, without additional fees.
Automate your sales process
Finding the best tools to help you automate your sales process so that you can focus on other things should be your top priority. A great way to achieve that is with proposal templates.
Better Proposals offer a vast variety of proposal templates you can customize to your liking and send out to your potential clients through a secure link, which allows them to sign it and pay the first fee, all without having to print out your proposal.
A huge advantage of this process is being able to track your sent proposals through an analytics system that notifies you when someone opens your proposal and lets you know how much time they spend on each section.
That allows you to nurture your leads and provide them with a better sales experience.
Conclusion
If you follow all these steps, you’re sure to make your first sales, as well as your second, third, and so on. You just need to make sure to stay true to your brand and to put your customers first.
Once you have a sizeable sample of customers, you can analyze your successful and unsuccessful sales and see what needs tweaking. Only by tracking proposals and measuring your previous sales, can you truly optimize your sales process for the better.
Petra Odak
Petra Odak is a Chief Marketing Officer at Better Proposals, a simple yet incredibly powerful proposal software tool that helps you send high-converting, web-based business proposals in minutes. She's a solution-oriented marketing enthusiast with more than 5 years of experience in various fields of marketing and project management.
