How to increase sales and demand through marketing?

If you want to quickly improve the results of your marketing, increase current demand and boost sales, then this blog is for you. In this blog, I’ll show you how to tune your current sales funnel to its full potential at a tactical level.

However, if you are selling products or services that have a long buying process or are being considered very carefully, then I recommend you read our blog post on creating a marketing strategy first. With a marketing strategy, you can significantly increase the long-term demand for your business, differentiate yourself from your competitors and win more of the customers you most want.

Then let’s get back to the tactical level. To grow your company’s sales, you need demand, and to get demand, you need marketing. You probably already knew this equation. In this blog post, I’ll focus specifically on how, by increasing demand, sales can also take off. With marketing, of course.

Whether your business is a large B2B company looking for leads or a smaller B2C online store, this blog post will be useful for you.

So without further ado, let’s dive straight in – to the funnel.

The importance of the sales funnel for driving sales and demand

For your business marketing to work the way you want it to, you need to build a sales funnel so that each stage of it talks to and supports each other.

So you can think of a sales funnel in the same way as a normal funnel. When the funnel is tight and has no holes, any liquid poured through the funnel flows directly into the bowl. If there are holes in the funnel, it is almost impossible to get all the liquid to hit the bowl. With a funnel with holes, some of the liquid will spill over without help, and someone else may be ready to catch the liquid you pour into their own bowl.

In the above metaphor, the liquid is your company’s leads and customers, and the bowl is your company’s main conversion point. A tight funnel indicates a well-planned marketing strategy, while a holey funnel indicates a poorly planned and executed marketing strategy. With a holey funnel, some of your customers will most likely flow past your main conversion point, possibly even to a competitor lurking near the funnel.

Building an effective sales funnel also requires that you know your market. Only then will you be able to deliver marketing value that stands out from the competition and attracts customers. This is the key to securing long-term demand and building a more profitable sales funnel. For this process, we’ve created the MVG model to help you create a management team-level marketing strategy, from understanding your target audience to measuring your objectives.

Numbers don’t lie – data-driven and measurable marketing (Measure)

Before delving into the different stages of the sales funnel, let’s go through the basis of each stage, the first letter M of the MRACE® model, Measure.

Of course, your company can do things like visually high-quality marketing that is also targeted in the right way. You can also get good results. But if you’re not measuring anything, your company’s marketing may not be very far-reaching.

Measured, data-driven marketing will help your business to grow demand and therefore sales more easily than if it relies solely on methods and channels that don’t measure results.

So why is measurement so important? Here again, let’s continue with a similar funnel metaphor that we discussed earlier. In this example, we add a juice concentrate as a liquid.

Using the funnel, you have successfully poured the juice concentrate into the bottle. Now it’s time to make yourself a bottle of juice, for which you need not only the concentrate but also water. You don’t know how sweet the concentrate is, so you’ll have to start by experimenting to see what kind of concentrate/water ratio will give you the result you want. Finding the right ratio will require some testing at first, but once you find the right ratio, it makes sense to take measurements so that you can continue to make equally tasty juice in the future. If you ever want to make a sweeter juice, it’s easy to increase the amount of concentrate you use now that you have the exact measurements and ratios to adjust the sweetness of the final juice dose.

If you didn’t record the tried and tested ratios from your testing, you’d find it quite a challenge to always get the right sweet, delicious dose of juice. Sure, with luck you could occasionally succeed without the measurements, but wouldn’t it be more convenient to always know how to achieve the desired result?

So, with luck, you can achieve results without measurement, but from the business perspective of your company, the better way to get the results you want is, more generally, data. When your business marketing strategy and execution is based on data, you are more likely to get results than if you just rely on good luck.

From a measurability perspective, it is also vital that your business has clear and realistic objectives that you want to achieve through marketing. By realistic, I don’t mean particularly easy targets, but that they should be achievable in the light of the resources and budget available. For example, if your business aims to double turnover, you often need to increase your budget and resources. If, on the other hand, you have to cut budgets and resources, doubling turnover may not be a very realistic goal.

When you want to reach a new audience (Reach)

In the quest for high conversions, the importance of a cold audience can sometimes be forgotten. However, to keep your sales funnel consistently churning out customers and leads on the way to conversions, reaching out to a cold audience is absolutely vital. You can’t keep pouring liquid into a bowl forever if you don’t pour more into the funnel.

To reach the cold audience – that is, to fill the top of your sales funnel – you need to know and have the courage to choose the right channels to reach your customers.

Social media marketing is an effective way to reach the cold audience you want, as the targeting possibilities are very broad. In social media channels, it is possible to target advertising from your interests and family background to your job title and place of residence.

In addition to social media marketing, Google advertising is also effective and profitable. The choice of the right channel will be discussed in more detail in the next section.

The Reach phase in a nutshell:
The purpose of this phase is to attract a cold audience to the top of your funnel, for example through social media and various Google channels.
In the ideal channel for your target audience, a properly targeted, arresting ad is the key to success in this phase.
Don’t forget the importance of a cold audience! A cold audience is like graphite that, on its way down the funnel, eventually turns into a diamond under heat and pressure.

So how do you choose the right channel for your target audience?

When choosing a marketing channel for your business, it’s good to be sensible, but also bold. For example, if your business is in the B2B sector and your top priority is lead acquisition, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram channels, as well as LinkedIn, are probably the most viable options. Pinterest or TikTok, on the other hand, may be wild cards that you shouldn’t count on, but also be open to. When choosing a social media channel, it’s worth considering which would be a winning advertising channel for your business.

Meta’s Facebook and Instagram channels are the social media channels that serve businesses on the widest scale, as they allow your business to easily reach both consumers and business decision-makers. Regardless of your company’s industry, marketing on Meta’s channels is often a safe bet, and it’s a good idea to expand into other channels as your business needs grow.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, is a great solution when you want to reach people in a particular sector, and especially business decision-makers, as LinkedIn allows you to target advertising based on professional skills, titles and experience.

TikTok advertising can give your company’s brand unique visibility, especially among younger consumers. This booming social media channel is more fast-paced than Meta’s and features high-quality, short video content designed to entertain, among other things. With TikTok, your business can reap the commercial benefits of participating in trends and staying ahead of the curve. In TikTok, different trends can live very quickly; a month is already quite a long time for one trend, so TikTok marketing often requires quick thinking, the ability to react to changes and the willingness to interact with customers.

Another visual advertising channel like TikTok is Pinterest, where your business can reach a cold, but even willing audience. Pinterest advertising is even a little more Google-like in its features, as it is a visual search engine that can also display ads based on keywords and search terms used.

Now that the social media channel options have been explored, it’s time to consider the potential of Google advertising to reach your target audience. When your potential customer may already be searching for the product or service they need, but not yet know about your business, Google Display and Discovery advertising is often an effective option.

If, on the other hand, you want to increase your brand awareness, for example, YouTube advertising is a very good option.

In addition to choosing a channel, it is also important for your business to be visible in organic Google searches. This can be achieved through search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation means that your business ranks high in the search results that matter to you, resulting in a free flow of visitors that leads to uninterrupted marketing.