How To Increase Your Sales & Profits by 30% [or More] in 2016

Without question, one of the biggest New Year’s resolutions for ambitious business owners and entrepreneurs is to increase sales and profits. In this article, I share with you what proven strategies I am consulting my clients to execute throughout 2016.

I would take this article and adapt it into your own marketing strategy/checklist.

• Social media is no longer the “great equalizer” as a free platform. To excel with social media marketing you will need to pay to boost the distribution of your content and lead capture pages. If you do not have a Facebook advertising strategy, then your marketing strategy is incomplete.
• Generate more reviews for your brand. This is not only a major trust factor that Google has identified in their “Zero Moment of Truth” research, but reviews are also becoming a major SEO factor in increasing rankings and visibility.
• Give your sales and customer service personnel the content that they dream of possessing. I have found that most sales people do not like the content that their brands provide them. And take it even one step further by having your team create the content for the brand. Employee generated content is powerful.
• Celebritize your customer. Create content that explores and extols your customer’s experiences with your brand and team.
• Where your content lives is now a big change. It costs a lot of money to drive traffic to your own website. Placing your content on “rented” space (i.e., LinkedIn Pulse, Facebook Notes, YouTube, guest blogging, etc.) is actually becoming more affordable than attempting to bring people to your site and hope they buy in there.
• Email is the bridge to creating tremendous value. All marketing roads will need to lead to your email data base. With email, you can drip feed your content and begin to showcase your value and services.
• Embrace video or become a branding relic. “All signs point to video. Whether it’s Facebook Live, video on Twitter, Periscope, Blab, Instagram, Vine or the old standby YouTube, 2016 will be the year when video becomes a primary content marketing consideration for all brands — even B2B. Partially because customer appetite for video (even low-res, real-time video) is insatiable. And partially because video is the most efficient way to atomize content marketing. If you have video, you have audio. If you have video, you have text (via transcription). If you have video, you have photos. But it doesn’t work the other way around.” — Jay Baer
• Marketing must become a series of exact, scheduled, effective, and measurable processes. Without a written marketing strategy, you will lose money, time, and patience.
• Content quality will need to dramatically increase. There’s so much content being produced out there, and way to few of it really good and valuable. The future of content marketing is less content but much better quality content. Like 10 times better. Otherwise, it will become a waste of time to create content.
• Focus your content distribution and engagement on 3 specific types of influencers: Industry analysts with whom you have established relationships, industry journalists who are relevant to you target audience, and business experts.
• Being helpful to customers is still an excellent strategy for competitive differentiation. Design customer experiences that make it easier for customer’s to get things done. Double down on creating REAL Relationships.
• B2B marketers need to crack the code on high quality, scalable video on a budget. This is what my Premier Expert platform is all about.
• Create more live events and do not hide behind digital content. Brands need to be face-to-face at conferences, events, and seminars.