How To Get More Customers Through Effective Branding, Marketing, and Sales

Let’s face it, your business won’t make any money if you don’t have customers. Attracting new clients and customers is the most important thing for your business, especially when you’re just starting out.

This is where effective branding, marketing, and sales comes in. People often confuse these three concepts and use them interchangeably; they’re actually three very different business functions.

In this article, you’ll find out what branding, marketing, and sales really is, and how you can use each function to grow your business and get more customers/clients.

Branding

In a nutshell , branding defines who you are as a business. It’s creating your own, unique identity that resonates with your customers and helps you stand out from the competition.

Building a strong brand will ultimately help your business get more loyal customers and achieve better results out of your marketing activities.

Here are several ways you can use branding to get more customers:

Understand Your Target Audience

Before you start developing your brand, know who you’re trying to attract in the first place. Your brand should represent who you truly are as a business, but it should also appeal to your target audience.

Create a buyer persona before anything else — find out who your ideal customer is in terms of age, gender, interests, habits, and other factors.

Keep this ideal customer in mind when you create your brand identity — like your company logo, colors, and brand voice.

The more relatable your business is to your audience, the more customers you’re likely to attract.

Establish Your Brand Values

Branding is so much more than just creating a visual or verbal identity — i.e. logo, brand colors, tone of voice, fonts, etc.

It’s also about establishing your ‘internal’ identity — the goals, hopes, and expectations of your company that customers can resonate with. In short, your brand values reflect what your business truly stands for.

For example, your brand values can be honesty, ethics, innovation, and sophistication. These core values will guide each and every action of your business, including the products and services you decide to sell and how you try to sell them.

Build Trust Around Your Brand

A recognizable brand doesn’t do much for your business anymore.

Consumers are now extremely careful about the brands they choose to buy from and associate themselves with.

This is exactly why building trust and credibility around your brand is so important — customers need to feel more secure buying from you.

To build trust around your brand, you need to develop an effective PR strategy for your business.

Reach out to relevant influencers in your niche, and use social proof, such as by showcasing positive reviews or promoting user-generated content, to attract more customers.

Be Consistent in Your Branding

Consistency is key to developing a strong brand!

According to a study, two-thirds of customers use more than one channel to make a purchase. Your brand colors, voice, logo, and values should all be consistent across all mediums — from your website and social media pages to print and digital ads.

Creating a strong brand is not an overnight process — it takes time, even years, to develop a powerful and credible brand that customers can genuinely recognize and relate to.

Marketing

While branding is concerned with establishing the meaning of your business, the job of marketing is to effectively communicate that meaning to customers and persuade them to buy from you.

Simply put — marketing activities help you reach out to your target audience, create brand awareness, communicate value, and generate leads or prospects for your business.

Let’s discuss some of the marketing strategies that help you attract more customers:

Website & SEO

If you don’t have a professional website already, get one now. Your customers/clients are probably searching for your services online — make sure you:

• Show up
• Make a good impression

To ensure that your website shows up in search results, invest in both organic and paid SEO. Optimize your website by incorporating relevant keywords, optimizing titles and headings, and using internal/external links.

Create compelling copy and clearly communicate all the services you offer. Most importantly, make it easy for new visitors to get in touch with you (either through phone, email, or a physical address).

Don’t forget to use a responsive, mobile-friendly web design that looks good across all devices and loads fast!

Content Marketing

Publishing quality content can help you attract more customers organically.

In fact, there are three major ways great content can help you:

• Educate potential clients and customers about your business
• Establish yourself as an expert in your niche
• Improve your search engine rankings

Create and distribute engaging content — blog posts, articles, guides, reports, case studies, eBooks, videos, and more — on multiple platforms to reach potential customers, position yourself as an industry leader, and generate leads.

Pro-tip: According to research, 54% of people prefer to see more video content from marketers!

Email Marketing

While not the newest, email is still one of the most effective digital marketing channels around. In fact, 68% of companies rank email as the best channel for ROI.

Here’s why — email is a highly valuable tool for reaching potential customers, or leads.

Your email audience has voluntarily shared their contact information with you — which means they’re interested in knowing more about your business.

You can use email to nurture these leads and convert them into paying customers — such as by offering discounts and special offers, or sharing news and updates about your company.

Social Media Marketing

The best place to reach your customers is where they are spending most of their time — social media.

But this doesn’t mean you should start making a profile on every single social network out there. Do your research and find out what your target audience uses.

For example — 78% of Snapchat users are aged between 18–24, while over 63% of LinkedIn users are over the age of 35.

Social media is a great place to engage with your audience, start conversations, get feedback, increase brand awareness, and drive traffic to your website.

You can share interesting and relevant content, such as news, polls, announcements, promotions, and more. Or invest in paid ads to reach a bigger audience.

Sales

Think of it this way — while marketing reaches and convinces people to buy, sales is the process of closing the deal and getting them to successfully complete the purchase.

Marketing generates leads and prospects.

Sales converts these leads into paying customers!

Here are some effective sales strategies to help you get more customers:

Optimize Your Sales Funnel

A sales funnel can be best described as a series of steps designed to convert prospective buyers into actual customers.

By optimizing your sales funnel, you ensure that your visitors are taken smoothly from the awareness stage to finally taking action.

An effective funnel typically starts with an enticing landing page that captures visitors’ email addresses — usually by offering incentives, like a free eBook or newsletter.

The next steps mostly include sales pages, upsell/bundle offers, and thank you pages that all end with a customer successfully completing a booking/subscription/purchase.

You can easily create high-converting sales funnels by using a drag-and-drop software, like ClickFunnels.

Perfect Your Sales Pitch

According to Salesforce, 82% of sellers are out-of-sync with their customers.

If you don’t do your homework, convincing buyers to whip out their wallets right away can be pretty tough!

A great sales pitch is a two-way street — it’s a conversation where you listen to your buyer, understand their problems, and then present your solution.

Here are some tips for creating the perfect sales pitch:

• Choose the right channel to reach your audience. Do they respond better on call? Or would they feel more comfortable communicating through email?
• Keep it short and sweet — don’t blabber on. Dive right into a clear value proposition that buyers can relate to
• Use facts and statistics to your own benefit — it helps create an impact, highlight the problem, and capture attention
• Always follow up with your leads. Studies show there’s a 21% chance of getting a response to your second email.

Offer Bundles and Discounts

A tried-and-tested sales strategy is to offer your products/services in bundles or at a discount.

Not only does this help you attract more customers, it lets you sell more products — even the ones that don’t sell that well on their own.

Plus, everyone likes to save money. A discount (even if it doesn’t affect your profit margin too much) looks a lot more appealing to potential customers.

Build Strong Customer Relationships

Your customers are your most valuable asset — make sure you build and nurture great customer relationships to attract new buyers, gain a competitive advantage, and keep old customers coming back for more.

CRM is an integral part of your sales strategy — simply because it plays such a huge role in getting customers to actually pay up.

Remember — your product/service might be the reason they buy from you the first time. But how you treat them will decide if they want to buy from you again.

Rev Up Your Branding, Marketing, and Sales

Attracting new customers is a big deal — you need to know your basics to make the most out of your time, effort, and money.

Branding, marketing, and sales are three very different functions that help you do that. But it’s easy to get confused — considering they often overlap and work in harmony with each other.

Knowing the difference between each function and aligning their respective strategies with your business goals can help you achieve better results and get more customers.