12 Digital Marketing Ideas for Sales Teams in 2019

A business can’t survive without a consistent online social presence. Online marketing strategies help increase target audience coverage, boost customer interest in goods or services, and make use of yet another major channel of retail. Below, we will share with you some of the most efficient internet marketing strategies for profitable online sales in 2019.

Why Marketing and Sales Need to Work Together

Let’s begin by defining the two concepts of marketing and sales in a bit more detail:

The term “marketing” implies a process that targets the following goals:

  • consumer market research for demand in terms of a certain product or service
  • assessment of company pricing policies’ efficiency in terms of distributed products or services
  • brand promotion of a particular product or service on the market

As such, the main goal of marketing is to provide a competitive advantage for a business in the market (and marketing for sales teams implies that businesses can work with maximum efficiency during the early sales funnel stages). 

In turn, sales are more of a one-sided thing when it comes to customer relations; they don’t usually imply getting any feedback from the market and are focused on selling as it is. 

Obviously, a perfect business model should combine these two fields and getting the most out of them. 

Let’s consider the specifics of marketing and sales interaction in more detail and talk about how to attract quality leads.

Attracting Higher Quality Leads

The main idea of lead generation is to offer potential leads something valuable in exchange for their contact information. As a rule, useful content is commonly offered (free content, at that). Thanks to such an offer, you can boost the flow of organic traffic on your website.

If your website is filled with valuable content, a website will also rank better in search engines and help with brand awareness.

lead generation

Here are some common types of content you can employ to try and attract some high-quality leads:

  • brochures
  • books
  • educational videos
  • statistical data
  • pro tip collections
  • tutorials
  • webinars

Leads That are Ready for Sales

In order to identify a lead that may be ready to make a purchase, you should first try to identify this certain person amongst the total traffic of your website visitors. Each lead should be assessed by specific parameters: their industry, occupation, age, gender, and more. Moreover, knowledge on what exactly brought a lead to your website, how many times they’ve visited your site, and how much time they spent browsing it. 

Based on the extracted data (related to a certain lead as well as on the lead’s particular interests with your website, their demands, expectations, and pain points) you should define what fits this lead best. 

It can be information about a certain niche of products, about a set of your services, or any information that can potentially satisfy some or other demands of the lead (in other words, something that would help the lead figure out the services or goods being offered, clear up doubts, and make a positive decision to purchase/order something from your site). The information is then directed to the lead (most often, to a group of leads that have similar requirements and interests) via email newsletter or through social media. 

The simplest way to solve such tasks is to use a CRM, which conducts automated lead behavior analysis,  segmentation, and implementation of group mailings (both via email and social networks).

A Marketing and Sales Service Level Agreement

Let’s consider a situation in which there is no marketing involved with the establishment’s operation, or their marketing strategy is very underdeveloped. 

Suppose you have several sales experts. For successful sales, they would require the following info:

  • a customer profile
  • comparative analysis of products with the involvement of competitor offers
  • price analysis, pricing policy, and discount allowances
  • takeaways and presentational material

With the mentioned information on hand, selling possibilities enhance and multiply. Many companies wouldn’t make much of themselves in the market if it weren’t for coordinated work of qualified marketers (which concerns B2C most of all). 

It’s difficult to explicitly separate marketing and sales: for instance, sales managers in online stores work mostly on fulfilling customer service while marketers are responsible for the promotion of the website, product-market studies, and then some. 

The Role of Digital Marketing for Sales Teams

Ignoring the behavioral traits of buyers online is unreasonable in the modern realities. Related studies and analyses will provide much more data on your target audience and possible leads than any dedicated focus group.   

That is exactly why marketing studies on the web and the consequential data that results from them allows for addressing the customer pain points in an utterly precise fashion without spending months trying to get to know them better.

Examples of How Sales and Marketing Work Together

Now, let’s take a look at three cases that explicitly demonstrate how sales experts and marketing teams can efficiently work together. 

sales and marketing teams

 

  • Interconnected workflow processes. If your sales and marketing teams perform separately and their workflow processes never intersect, you should think about synchronizing similar tasks between them to boost the overall performance. For example, you can make your salespeople responsible for collecting customer data during communication with them (e.g., it’s good to offer existing leads a survey for boosting the quality of service and client satisfaction).
  • Expand the sales department employees’ scope of responsibility. On the other hand, if you operate a small company, you may not have in-house dedicated marketers at all (if we’re talking about an online store, marketers are usually hired from the outside and temporarily). Because of that, we’d recommend gradually expanding the scope of sales experts’ competency in order to boost the level of personalization in the approach to each customer (it’s always a good thing when a seller is also partially a psychologist). 
  • Implement automation. Last but not least, you can leave your two departments working separately with new work “rules.” Instead, you could employ special automation software (like Nimble) which would provide employees with the exact required data right in the moment of strict need for it.

How to Accelerate Your Sales Team via Digital Marketing

Now, let’s go through some of the top marketing ideas for sales teams you can readily employ for your own business benefit. 

SEO ideas

With well-thought-out SEO efforts, you have an excellent opportunity to expand the volume of organic traffic your website usually receives. As a result, your sales team will start working with more customer requests and start keeping the performance on a consistent level.  

First things you could do is start posting thought-leadership content on your site (we’ll talk about it in more detail below), work on the efficient semantic core, work through headlines, and form a database of links (both internal and external). 

As much as you can be active in optimizing your updated content, however, it won’t affect search engines in the required way if you neglect the re-optimization of the existing website on a regular basis. The thing is, common search requests change with time, and certain materials cease to be relevant over time, so leaving the website content unchanged for years on end isn’t reasonable. 

Keep in mind that outdated content lowers the level of client trust.

Email marketing ideas

Back in the day, email newsletter amounted to regular spam. Today, advanced marketing tools that track user behavior through their email inboxes provides leads with truly demanded, profitable solutions with personal discounts and special offers. 

We believe that email marketing should be listed among the most efficient tools for boosting the quality of successful retail deals. 

Content marketing ideas

Regular replenishment of a site with unique, targeted content also helps a lot in the organic traffic attraction.

Try to update your materials at least once a week.

Social media marketing ideas

SMM is more than just having social profiles in common networks where content is posted from time to time.

Modern SMM is a powerful tool for influencing users. With its help, you’ll be able to:

  • Increase customer service quality (e.g., a multi-brand store Asos accepts customer submissions related to the shipment, payment, and other issues in their social profiles)
  • Attract interest to new products (posts about new offers are sure to excite leads)
  • Improve target audience reach with special offers, giveaways, etc. (all is simple here – existing leads may bring new ones if you announce such a requirement as obligatory for taking part in some competition or such) 

Online Media ideas

Media content can be considered among the most demanded and attractive for Internet users. Why not employ this format of web content to bring in new leads and boost the interest of the existing ones?

  • Try to create quality video reviews of your products or services employing the help of an influencer
  • As an option, you could create a descriptive presentation of your company in the format of viral web content and upload it to YouTube 

Landing page/website ideas

If your business was initially deployed offline, it would be wrong to pass on its further development in the online environment where the general number of all TA is gathered. 

The simplest and most cost-efficient way to initialize web promotion of your business is to create a dedicated web resource. It can be either a single landing page if you provide a modest amount of products or services, or a fully-featured website in the form of catalog or eCommerce solution.

Marketing automation ideas

With the help of marketing automation, you can significantly boost the quality of performance your sales department employees deliver. 

This can be done by implementing:

  • CRM software that would cover practically every sales funnel stage;
  • Marketing software that would be responsible for certain tasks and provide high efficiency in solving short-term business objectives (e.g., a newsletter service MailChimp can help a lot with the attraction of new leads and retention of the existing ones).

Remember that if you are planning to scale in the future, you shouldn’t confuse your in-house employees with a barrage of different tools and services. It’d be best to integrate a single solution that would serve as a centralized framework for everybody. 

Creating a Marketing Strategy for Sales Team

The creation of a marketing strategy for the sales team implies expending the competency of the sales department workers.

You can do this in several ways:

 

  • Qualification boost through courses. Many companies go this way to expand the competency of their existing staff. Various marketing courses, themed literature – if your employees aren’t swamped head to toe with work, they’ll make great use of all that. 

 

  • Addition of new responsibilities. Alternatively, you can add some tasks for you in-house marketers – e.g., to start making regular mini-surveys among the existing clientele.

 

  • Implementation of automation software. Automation comes to the rescue once again. Automated marketing tools provide the most optimal way of employing efficient marketing strategies while making a profit off of obsolete manual processes.

Tools for Sales Teams to Use

The most typical form of software sales teams can use to handle both their direct responsibilities and deliver successful digital marketing efforts is CRM. Instead of courses that require time, you can synchronize the work of all your marketers with a cloud-based CRM that updates data in real-time and can be accessed by all workers with sufficient access rights at all times. 

One of the powerful particular cases of prominent CRM systems is cloud-based Nimble. Nimble is your simple, smart CRM for Office 365 and G Suite that works inside your Outlook inbox. It delivers actionable intelligence, team contact management, templated tracking, and pipeline management. 

All you need is an email address or social handle and Nimble will do the rest. Find out who your key contacts are and what their businesses are about. Nimble delivers emails, locations, and phone numbers to help you build better relationships.

sales and marketing

 

What can marketing do for sales? Digital marketing and sales are two closely interconnected ways of doing business either online or offline. The proper automation tool is your best bet at interlinking them further and ultimately improving them. We’ll gladly let you test out Nimble CRM for free so that you can see for yourself how simple and accessible it makes all your business processes.