7 ways to increase your start-up company sales
1)Cold calling – Known as a dirty word, cold calling is still widely adopted by lots of businesses who want to get in touch with other businesses (known as B2B). In the information age we have so many distractions from overloaded email inboxes to advertising messages that don't get read. With companies increasingly wanting to do business abroad a meeting accompanied by the costs of flights and hotels are not always viable. If you decide to start cold calling and have never done it before its always best to structure it in to allotments of time for data mining which is collating company names, phone numbers and contact details of the decision maker.
2)SEO
Many companies don't think about doing search engine optimisation until they have done other sales and marketing channels first, this is a big mistake as people are actively searching for the product or service that you sell. There are several elements involved in making your website more search engine friendly known as on-page optimisation and further to that the majority of the factors around ranking your website in the top 10 of google and other search engines are building back links to your site. You can opt to build a few quality backlinks each week by contacting blogs and offering to do a guest post, along with listings in directories, and writing content for article directories. Alternatively if you don't have the time to do this you can outsource it to a
want an affordable seo agency uk who will help you build a search marketing strategy.
3)PPC (Pay per click marketing)
Google's adwords program is a great way for new businesses to get traffic straight away to their website. You can do this easily by researching what keywords are out there using google's keyword tool and even do some gap analysis of what keywords your competition are appearing on to help keep you ahead of the game. Picking a good pay per click agency can give you a head start on your competitors
4)ECRM (Email customer relationship management)
If you can give a ebook or white paper away for free it can enable you capture your clients email address. As long as you don't spam them by sending an email daily then this can be a good way of selling to your customers without being to in their face. Its more like a gentle reminder that you're the expert in the field and will also allow you to mention it when you call them back, which can in turn improve your newsletter or blog content if you ask them for feedback.
5)Public Speaking
If you can get a speaker spot at an event then this is a great way of demonstrating that you know a topic as an expert. Quite often event companies will require you to become a sponsor of the event in order to speak there, however its always worth phoning up the company before hand to see if anyone drops out. Getting a speaker spot is often a PR game of knowing the right person or doing some kind of public speaking at a local level and then moving on to bigger events as they've seen you speak before.
6) Event networking
Attending events whether its as a guest or an exhibitor is often a great way to form new contacts. If you do have a stand then it makes it easier to approach people but then again I've found the best contacts by drumming up a conversation over a coffee at a shared table. By attending the speaker talks you will often more likely to find clients who are eager to learn more for free.
