Content marketing is a cost-efficient way to get your name in front of prospects most likely to convert. By creating and publishing your own content using proper SEO practices, you can cut down your overall marketing costs for good.
After creating your content, the next thing on your mind is how to increase your revenue. This article will provide some tips to excel.
- How do you Generate Revenue From Content?
- How Can I Generate Revenue Quickly?
- How do you Maximize Sales With Digital Content?
- What are 4 General Ways to Increase Sales?
- Which Platform is Best for Content Creators?
- Is Content Creation Profitable?
- What is Revenue Strategy?
- How Can Social Media Increase Sales?
How do you Generate Revenue From Content?
The first thing you need to understand is that you need to get a good grounding in your creative niche before creating content. If this is taken care of, following the tips below will help you to generate and even increase your revenue.
1. Create An Online Community
When it comes to making money online, you have to build a community or be a part of other popular communities.
A community is a platform where you attract and connect with all sorts of like-minded people. This is where your audience can get valuable advice, tips, and tricks. If you are a marketer, your audience should turn to your community to fix their marketing-related needs.
Read Also: Content Monetization Strategies for 2023
For example, when people need to get some advice on social media marketing, they visit communities like Social Media Examiner.
Likewise, when people need some DIY help, they go to channels like 5-Minutes Craft on YouTube.
To make real money, you have to do something similar to 5-Minutes Craft or Ryan ToysReview. When you create a community, your ideal audience will be comfortable and happy to be a part of it.
2. Offer Exclusive Content
You make money online when you offer something exclusive and exciting – It is not a one-off job. If you think you can make a couple of videos on YouTube and start earning, that probably won’t happen.
You need to be consistent, relevant, and result-focused. First, you create content to attract and build your audience and then consistently create new content.
Let’s assume that you still don’t have a following online. This is where you need your premium content to build your tribe.
There is no shortage of platforms if you have something amazing to share. Take TikTok or Clubhouse as an example. People just use their great content to start building an audience quickly.
If you get a chance to join Clubhouse, you would know how people build communities and get plenty of exposure for their content. Some people are hosting private rooms for art where they buy, sell, and trade.
Creators are even doing special NFT (non-fungible token) drops.
3. Collaborate
Success becomes a lot easier when you collaborate. Just go out and find some of the top brands, influencers, and people in your industry. See how you can serve them first before ever asking for anything. Go like, comment, share their content and build them up the way you want someone to do for you.
Collaborations work when you take the time to build transparent and mutually beneficial relationships with people whose audience aligns with yours. Like-minded brands and people can be your ambassadors if you follow the right strategies to build relationships.
We understand it takes a lot of effort and time to find the right people. But it’s worth your time. Start with helping and serving others, and everything else will start to fall in line.
Building relationships online is like making friends offline. You meet someone and get to know each other. When you develop good chemistry, only then can you work on a mutually beneficial relationship.
Your goal should be to be omnipresent. Try to look into every place where your content would be appreciated and liked.
4. Use Social Media Advertising
While it is not mandatory to use paid advertising, sometimes it’s necessary to use it depending on your goals. Social media advertising is a must if you are looking to expand your reach. No matter how good your content is, it is becoming harder and harder to promote it organically.
Of course, it can be challenging to shift from organic social strategy to paid advertising. But it is essential to understand that social media platforms are also looking to make money.
They don’t want your content to reach millions for no reason unless your content is genuinely viral. Therefore, you must learn to run profitable social media advertising campaigns and get the extra help you need to expand your reach.
Paid social ads are a hyper-direct way to reach the people you want. For example, if you are a coach and have excellent how-to guides for your audience, you may use Facebook or Instagram ads to reach the right people and warm up a new audience. After all, social media advertising is one of the best ways to grow your brand quickly.
All the major social networks offer advertising options. However, you should not be using all of them. Just use those platforms where your people like to spend time.
For example, if your audience is business CEOs or entrepreneurs, it might help focus on Linkedin. Likewise, TikTok can be a great place to show your content if your audience is Gen Z or Millenials.
Consider running ads on social sites that are producing good results for you organically.
5. Offer A Product Or Service
Offer something your audience can’t resist. This is a proven marketing tactic to get more eyes on your content.
For example, if you have a set of super-exclusive sneakers, then create a private/exclusive sneaker drop with a limited supply. Or offer a subscription service that includes specific content for a specific person.
Or offer an exclusive NFT drop.
The purpose here is to motivate your audience or give them something that could push them to subscribe to or sign up for your offers.
There are so many things you can do to make irresistible offers. Let me give you some hints:
- Free guides or ebooks
- Exclusive one-time drops
- Free subscription
- Offer exclusive perks for a limited time
- Free membership
- Free samples
- Lifestyle discounts
Be sure to offer something valuable and attractive. It is an excellent way to grow your audience quickly.
6. Use Branded Partnerships
If you want to create a sustainable stream of revenue, you need to work on your audience’s perception of your brand.
It is vital to create a one-of-a-kind experience that differentiates you from the rest of the competition. Nonetheless, creating that robust and memorable experience on your own is challenging.
Solution?
Develop strong branded partnerships to give your content a real boost. A branded partnership is the process of working with other brands to share and cross-promote your content with their audiences.
For instance, if you are a fitness coach, it might be good to partner up with brands that produce weight loss products. This way, you expose your content to a new audience that might be interested in whatever you offer.
7. Sell What You’re Good At
Do not try to be everything to everyone on the internet. The internet is a competitive world where everyone is looking to get their share of attention. If you are not clear on what you offer and who your audience is, making money online will be difficult. So, only sell what you are good at so you differentiate yourself against the competition.
Ask yourself a simple question: why should people buy my products and use my content when they have other credible sources to get the same information and products?
This is where you understand the importance of targeting a specific segment of the market. When you try to cater to everyone, you end up speaking to no one. So, do what you are good at and then find the right people who would love to consume your content.
8. Create Content Consistently
Consistency is key to success. Just study some of the top-paid content creators, and you will know how critical it is to be consistent in your content creation efforts. When you create great content consistently, you follow a specific process that improves over time.
Being a content creator looking to make a living, you can’t afford to be inconsistent. If your audience likes your content, keep giving them more, so they keep coming back.
Your audience and followers will surely turn to someone else when you stop meeting their expectations and stop producing content consistency.
At Digitalmarketing.org, we have grown our audience from zero to 50k readers in a few years. It happens because we keep producing great content regularly, and we understand how to provide content our readers love.
9. Get Tips: Use The Tipping Feature
Tipping people on social media for their content is starting to become extremely popular and mainstream. So, here comes another way to make money as a content creator. Get tips!
Facebook recently started a tipping feature that allows Facebook users to tip their favorite content creators. People can simply buy a pack of Stars and then send them to streamers during a live session. However, this feature is only limited to gaming streams.
More and more social media platforms will introduce this tipping feature to help content creators make more money. So, get ready to create content that will generate the maximum number of tips.
OnlyFans is also an excellent platform for content creators. It enables you to make money through subscriptions, tips, and selling pictures. Your fans can send tips during a live stream or directly through your messages.
Platforms like Clubhouse are likely to introduce this feature to make things more exciting for their users.
The tipping feature will also help understand what kind of content your audience enjoys the most.
Also, look at the creator coin and how those creators innovate new ways for their fans to get cool perks, NFT drops, rewards and trade coins on the blockchain.
10. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing comes with is a huge income potential for content creators. And yes, you can make money while you sleep. Affiliate marketing is when someone pays you a commission for sales or leads generated from your efforts.
Here is what you need to consider:
Before buying anything, people like to take advice from experts online. Now, let’s say you are quite popular among your audience, and people love to listen to your tips and tricks.
You have the power to influence your audience’s buying behavior or inspire them to buy something through your enticing content. That is where you can generate passive money through affiliate links.
How many sales or leads you generate are tracked through an affiliate link.
Here is how affiliate links work?
You place an affiliate link within your blog or site, linking to a product. Now, whenever someone clicks on that link and buys the product, you will receive a commission. For example, if you create content about education, you can consider selling some educational products through affiliate marketing.
Another example could be putting a link in your blog for an Amazon book or partnering up with prominent influencers to sell their products and services.
11. Become A Social Media Influencer
Social media influencers make millions of dollars. I am not talking about Christiano Ronaldo or Kim Kardashian.
An ordinary person with talent and limited resources can become a social media influencer and make some serious money. TikTok, for example, is a platform where anyone can show their content and grow their following.
The internet hosts all kinds of influencers. But we can divide them into the following four categories:
- Nano influencers (1k-10k followers)
- Micro-influencers (10k-100k followers)
- Macro influencers (100k – 1Million followers)
- Mega influencers (1M+ followers)
How Can I Generate Revenue Quickly?
To keep your business running, you need to increase revenues. Increasing revenues are a sign of good financial health of a business. The basic operational marketing and service tactics below can help small business owners cut their costs and boost their business revenues.
Determine Your Goals
You must start with a clear strategy that is aligned with your revenue goals. You need to identify what success looks like and develop the route to get there. Defining your revenue goals is important in each stage of your business.
For example, during the start-up period, your initial revenue goal is to achieve profitability. However, once the business survives the perilous start-up stage, the next goal is to grow your revenues to be able to fund the company’s strategic growth, exceed gross and net revenue targets and build reserves for your business.
Once you’ve outlined your goals and have identified what actually drives sales and revenue, you can focus on the activities that will help you accomplish them.
Focus on Repeat Customers
Instead of spending resources trying to gain new customers, small business should focus on upselling or cross-selling current customers. This is significantly more effective and cost-efficient as your current customers are already acquainted with your products and services and are therefore more likely to do business with you.
A customer appreciation gesture such as special discounts and freebies will lead your past customers and clients to their next purchase. This gives them the impression that you went the extra mile for them because they are important to you.
Connecting with your existing customers can also be an excellent way to acquire new customers to boost business growth. Since people are inclined to connect with others like them, giving existing customers a strong referral incentive can be a big win for your business.
Add Complimentary Services or Products
Bundling complimentary products and services can lead to an increase in sales without additional overhead costs. Bundling is usually associated with savings. Even when the savings is nominal for the customer, it’s still a much easier and cost-efficient sale for you.
Hone Your Pricing Strategy
Price is the most important factor in purchase decision making. An adjustment to the product and service prices should be in line with your market situation and the revenue goals.
A sudden increase in price will bring more revenues and boost business profits only when it doesn’t negatively impact sales. You should try to understand how the price of competitor’s products and how your product stacks up against similar products from the buyer’s standpoint This will allow you to best position your prices in the marketplace.
Instead of a dramatic increase in price, consider regularly raising your prices. While a small price jump may not seem important when compared to the full price, it has a direct impact on the profit margins and the bottom line.
Offer Discounts and Rebates
When discounts are properly marketed, they create an incentive for consumers to start buying. The discounts can be on limited products such as quantity discounts offered on two or more products, seasonal discounts or discounts on all products in a store-wide sale.
A rebate also known as a deferred discount is issued after the purchase of the product as a percentage of the price in cash. The publicized discount generates additional sales while the lower redemption rate reduces its cost.
Use Effective Marketing Strategies
An obvious way to improve sales and boost revenue is through marketing. Analyze data on customer purchases and product preferences. Based on strategic plans, then develop targeted promotions to hit specific customers with ad messages and promotional offers.
There are a variety of marketing strategies and channels you can use to get your product or service noticed. This includes:
- Website
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Public relations
- Content marketing
- Traditional marketing through flyers and billboards
It can also be useful to review and analyze marketing data from previous years to see what strategies and channels work best for you.
Invigorate Your Sales Channel
To energize your sales channel, you need to generate enthusiasm and a reason to buy. This can be done by introducing vibrant, bright-colored sales collaterals that include all your products and services and convey a sense of urgency, incentivizing sales partners and adding subscription sales.
Review Your Online Presence
It’s vital to review your online presence periodically. Review your websites and see how they are being viewed on different devices. You can use analytics to review your website traffic and develop plans to improve the customer’s online experience. Use a combination of organic and paid search engine marketing efforts to reach your customers.
How do you Maximize Sales With Digital Content?
Increase sales with Digital Marketing is possible if we make the choices for the best strategies. The right actions boost engagement, capture the target audience, generate conversions, and result in sales.
If you want to get ahead, you need to have strong digital marketing strategies in place. We’ve compiled our top 7 techniques right here.
1. Define and Understand Your Customers
Understanding your customer’s online presence, preferences, interaction, and expectations is vital. Rather than treating them as a monolith, try to separate them into related segments.
Younger generations often prefer different marketing channels than older ones, while the popularity of certain social media platforms will vary based on location. Knowing where certain demographics interact with you will allow you to target your marketing more effectively.
One way to make use of these data is to develop several customer personas. Personas can help you to understand the different sections of your target audience. In fact, research shows that 71% of companies that exceed their revenue goals use customer personas.
Acquiring customer information can be done through many ways. Data analytics, call recording for business software, and customer feedback surveys are all potential methods. Once you have the data, you can uncover the channels they concentrate on and make smart investment choices. Creating a specific digital marketing strategy for your company enables you to increase ROI.
2. Align Your Brand
Without a strong, recognizable brand, customers will fail to bond with your company. You need to develop a brand reputation. This can be done through elements such as:
- Language
- Logos
- Design
- Brand story and values
But most importantly, these elements have to align with and make sense for your brand. A successful organization thinks, does, and says the same thing consistently. This is achieved through excellent team collaboration and strong management.
A lot of companies sometimes force themselves into hot conversations that don’t align with their brand values. An example of this was Audi’s gender equality super bowl commercial. It received a lot of social media clap back because Audi themselves had no women on their management board. So, the advert appeared to promote values the brand itself didn’t hold—not a good look.
This leads us to the next point: honesty. You shouldn’t undersell your product or service, but being honest and straightforward is important for reducing customer churn.
3. Keep in Touch with Email Campaigns
Statistics show that for every $1 you spend on email marketing you can expect an average of $42 back. This means that email campaigns are one of the most useful tools for increasing sales.
However, it’s not enough to send out emails. Tailoring them to your audience is incredibly important. This means segmenting your emails using the customer personas we mentioned earlier. Research shows that companies that use a one-fits-all email marketing approach end up with:
- 60% of their emails deleted;
- 27% unsubscribe rate;
- 23% of their emails marked as spam.
Email automation is also crucial. It allows you to contact customers at exactly the right time. Not only that, it can help you track metrics, present offers, and send emails to customers who have abandoned their cart.
Keep in mind that emails are not only useful for attracting new visitors—they can help retain customers, too. A well-constructed follow-up email can keep them thinking about you long after their purchase. Since increasing customer retention by a mere 5% can increase your profits by 25-95%, it’s well worth the effort.
4. Measure the Success of Content
As the title of this article suggests, digital marketing can increase your sales. But what if you’ve revamped your website, increased your marketing budget, invested in the best productivity software for small business—and found that something still isn’t right?
It may be that you’re not tracking and measuring the content you’re putting out.
Measuring and tracking content allows you to understand the way customers look at your most popular web pages and products. This will provide insights for making well-informed decisions in the future.
Accurate analytics can also let you know which search engines are leading to your site and which locations are popular for your product or service. This means you can invest in the correct channels and therefore attract more of the customers that you want.
5. Optimize Your Channels
Optimization is vital in digital marketing. It can mean the optimization of your staff to create an efficient and connected workforce. It can also mean website and mobile app optimization—important as 80% of users use mobile devices to browse the Internet.
It can also mean SEO (search engine optimization), which determines the rank of your website. The higher your website ranks, the more traffic you will create. The more traffic you bring in, the more sales you will generate.
When people search on Google, 75% of them never even look at the second results page. If that’s not enough, here are some more reasons to improve your SEO:
- SEO boosts your brand recognition, which increases your authority and credibility and builds trust with customers
- Your user experience will also be improved as consumers will be able to find what they’re looking for easier
- You can focus on local SEO as, on average, 87% of consumers will only travel 15 minutes to make an everyday purchase
- SEO practices enable you to have a better understanding of the web market and competitor tactics
- SEO is a long-term solution that provides a good ROI
6. Boost Engagement with Social Media
Communicating with customers is a hugely important part of running a business. Did you know that 79% of the US population uses social media? So, if social media marketing isn’t high up on your team’s online meeting agenda, then you might have an issue.
Not only is social media content great for advertising your product or service, it also allows you to meaningfully engage with your audience. Here are a few tips to drive sales using social media:
- Pick the correct social media channel for your demographic
- Don’t be afraid to use paid ads to increase your reach, engagement, and impressions
- Observe your competitors, find out what makes your company unique, and learn from your past campaigns
- 70% of teens trust YouTube creators and 40% of millennials relate to their favorite creator more than their friends. Take advantage of this and work with social media influencers that align with your brand
7. Use Discounts to Your Advantage
Discounting is another method often used to increase sales. In fact, 57% of customers made a purchase from a new brand only after being offered a discount.
Think of a reason for your discount. This could be a customer’s birthday, Christmas, or any other event. Be as creative as you want. By adding a time limit on the discount, you can generate customer urgency and overall demand for your product.
It can work for B2B companies, too. For instance, if you provide communications services, you may have some customers concerned about VoIP service cost or unsure about investing in a new CRM (customer relationship management) program. By implementing discounts for a limited time, you are more likely to draw these customers in so that they make a purchase.
It’s important to note that a bad discounting strategy can be damaging. It can affect the perception of your brand (you don’t want to look cheap, after all), affect operations, and reduce profit margins. So it’s important to:
- create a tailored strategy that aligns with your brand;
- make sure consumers don’t take the discounts for granted;
- provide a high-quality product or service.
What are 4 General Ways to Increase Sales?
If you want your business to bring in more money, there are only 4 Methods to Increase Revenue: increasing the number of customers, increasing average transaction size, increasing the frequency of transactions per customer, and raising your prices.
Here’s how to apply these strategies:
- Increasing the number of customers means you’re trying to bring more people in the door. This strategy is relatively straightforward: more visitors to your restaurant will equal more tabs, which (assuming the average transaction size stays the same), will bring in more money.
- Increasing average transaction size means you’re trying to get each customer in to purchase more. This is typically done through a process called upselling. When a customer purchases an entree, you offer them appetizers, drinks, and dessert. The more of these items the customer purchases, the more they spend, and the more revenue you collect.
- Increasing the frequency of transactions per customer means encouraging people to purchase from you more often. If your average customer comes in once a month, convincing them to patronize your business once a week will increase your revenue. The more frequently they visit your establishment, the more revenue your restaurant will bring in, assuming the average transaction size stays the same.
- Raising your prices means you’ll collect more revenue from every purchase a customer makes. Assuming your volume, average transaction size, and frequency stay the same, raising your prices will bring in more revenue for the same amount of effort.
Remember the lesson of Qualification: not every customer is a good customer. Some customers will sap your time, energy, and resources without providing the results that you’re looking for. If you’re spending a lot of energy serving customers who don’t come in often, have a low average transaction size, don’t spread the word, and complain about the price, it doesn’t make sense to attract more of those customers.
Always focus the majority of your efforts on serving your ideal customers. Your ideal customers buy early, buy often, spend the most, spread the word, and are willing to pay a premium for the value you provide.
The more ideal customers you can attract, the better your business.
Which Platform is Best for Content Creators?
A content creator platform is a space where people can create and share content, whether it’s text, video, images, or something else. A good content creator platform gives creators the ability to grow their following (both in quantity and quality of and hopefully monetize their work too.
1. Grin
Grin describes itself as an all-in-one creator management platform helping eCommerce companies. It recognizes the importance of brands utilizing creators as brand storytellers.
It customizes its pricing to match the needs of your brand. With its eCommerce focus, it should be no surprise that Grin integrates easily with major eCommerce software like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento.
You can easily manage everyday tasks from inside Grin, including managing and shipping products to your influencers, creating sales tracking links to pay commissions, and creating exclusive discount codes. Grin pulls all the registered users from your eCommerce site and then finds potential influencers.
You can use Grin to manage your campaigns, working with influencers throughout the process straight through to the content going live, at which point it notifies you. You build a content gallery with every photo and video from your campaigns available for download, which you can then repurpose. In addition, the reporting function has a real-time counter of sales that occur as a result of your campaigns.
2. Creator.co
As its (current) name indicates, Creator.co focuses on the creator economy. The platform’s focus is as much on creating content as it is on distributing that content. Because its creators generally fall into the micro-influencer category, the quality of their content is more important to Creator.co and its users than it is to many other influencer marketplaces.
Creator.co is a prime example of an influencer marketing platform doubling up as a content creation platform. And unlike many of these platforms, Creator.co is designed and priced to appeal to small and medium businesses.
You can select from two versions of Creator.co. One is self-service, where you use the platform as a tool to assist with your influencer collaboration. Alternatively, you could pick a plan that operates more like an agency, where you can leave Creator.co to do most of the work for you.
In the latter case, you create and define your campaign and ideal influencer, and the system chooses from 100,000+ registered creators who shop and actively participate in campaigns. If you prefer to search for influencers yourself, you can filter and invite from a database of 500+ million social profiles featuring advanced insights on each creator.
Creator.co offers “Deep Insights” reports for any influencer, with in-depth data highlighting an influencer’s suitability for your brand.
Creator.co’s built-in Amplification feature is particularly useful for most brands. It moves an asset directly into Facebook Ads Manager.
3. YouTube
YouTube now has over 2 billion users, which makes it a GIANT in terms of social media platforms. Users watch a cool 1 billion hours of YouTube content.
As a content creator platform, YouTube is pretty straightforward to use and grow on. If you love creating videos of any kind, whether you do puppets or political interviews, YouTube might be a good place for you. Users can create their own channels, upload videos, and go live.
The best part about YouTube for content creators is that YouTube is actually the world’s second-largest search engine. What that means is that, unlike other social media platforms, your videos will keep getting organic traffic for years after you post them if done right. You need to choose a clear niche, and make sure you optimize your posts with keywords, but after that, the sky is the limit.
The worst part of being a content creator on YouTube?
Well, there are two things.
The first one is the competition. 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE. If you’re creating your videos on YouTube, you’ll have to break through the noise.
The second thing that isn’t great for creators on YouTube is the monetization options. If you were monetizing through advertising, you’d need anywhere from 1-2 million views to make $1,000. Although YouTube is adding some new monetization features like paid subscriptions, these take a lot of work too. If it’s hard to grow free subscribers on YouTube, how hard do you think it will be to grow paid subscribers?
Taken together, YouTube is a pretty obvious place for you to be if you’re a video creator. But for monetization, think about pairing it with another platform.
4. TikTok
TikTok is a viral video site that creators are using to rack up MILLIONS of views. It’s the new kid on the block and the algorithms aren’t old and crusty yet like other social media sites. This means that people are growing audiences FAST on TikTok. This is a huge advantage.
The downside? TikTok requires some pretty constant posting to grow that huge audience, and some creators can get tired of the treadmill. Some of the biggest TikTokers post up to 10x daily. So if you need to create this much content, and make sure it’s quality, you’ve got your work cut out for you.
If you’re a content creator that can handle that schedule, good on you! Go win TikTok.
For some of us mortals, that gets to be a bit much. Especially considering that posting the same content on YouTube will generate organic traffic (although there’s nothing to stop you from cross-posting to both platforms).
If you love to make videos, have tons of fun ideas, and can shine on camera–TikTok might be your jam.
Aside from the potentially high burden of constantly creating content on TikTok, there’s one more big disadvantage: monetization. It’s estimated that you need 10 times the subscribers and views on TikTok as on YouTube to earn the same amount of money. This means that most TikTok creators will see next to nothing for their work.
5. Upfluence
Upfluence has a massive database of 3 million influencers, with every piece of their content analyzed for reach and engagement. It contains all the tools you need to streamline your campaigns, including campaign briefs, draft reviews, email templates, payment instructions, influencer status and actions, pricing offers, and influencer payment management.
You can write and save influencer campaign briefs detailing your objectives and expectations and let influencers respond to your offer directly within the platform. The agency’s inclusion of draft review is particularly useful for content creation and management.
Your selected influencers can create content for your campaign, and you can use the tool to moderate and approve it. Content creators submit their drafts and open two-way communication between the influencers and your team.
Is Content Creation Profitable?
Moreover, the demand for online content has grown rapidly. In 2019, the number of YouTube channels that boasted over 1 million subscribers had increased by 65%. What’s more, according to the platform, over 1 billion hours of YouTube content are watched every day.
That’s just video content on YouTube. There are also many other specialist content sites that are equally popular such as Spotify, iTunes and Medium to mention only a few. Whether you are a blogger or vlogger, a podcaster or YouTuber, below are 14 ways that you can generate money.
- Online Teaching
- Consulting
- Selling Exclusive Content
- Subscriptions
- Selling Art
- Selling Merch
- Selling Stock Photos
- Branded Sponsorships
- Public Appearances
- Content Syndication
- Affiliate Marketing
- Donations
- Direct Advertising
- Social Media Advertising
What is Revenue Strategy?
A revenue strategy is a plan that increases revenue by amplifying short-term (e.g., cold-calling) and long-term sales (e.g., aligning marketing and sales) initiatives.
The Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) typically spearheads the revenue strategy. They’d coordinate all revenue-focused departments (e.g., marketing, sales, customer success), break down their silos, and encourage cross-collaboration.
Developing a revenue strategy for your startup pays off. It optimizes your marketing and sales teams’ effectiveness, which ultimately creates an excellent customer experience and accelerates revenue down the road. For one startup (which you’ll learn about it shortly), implementing a revenue strategy even helped double its client base!
How Can Social Media Increase Sales?
Social media can be one of the best ways to connect with your audience and get your company in front of countless numbers of prospective customers. It’s also a fantastic way to generate sales when you use the right techniques.
1. Use paid ads to attract more eyes
The best way to leverage social media is through paid ads as you can reach a larger audience and appear more on people’s feeds.
Recently, organic reach has been continuously dropping due to the new social media algorithms. By paying to increase the likelihood of people seeing your content, it will lead to more sales and brand awareness.
Whilst all social media platforms has the feature for paid ads, Facebook has the most extensive tools and it’s super easy to use too! Facebook allows you to boost your posts to increase one of the four objectives:
1. Reach
2. Engagement
3. Impressions
4. Click-throughs
You can even customise the location reached, how much you want to spend, the target demographic and even the interests of the audience. I’m sure that when you’re browsing on your own social media newsfeed, you will come across these paid ads from other businesses.
Whether it be through photos, videos or even stories, paid ads are effective and are definitely worth the investment!
2. Work with social media influencers
Whilst it is important to build your own social following, many businesses are also making use of social influencers to increase their sales. Social media influencers are people who have a large number of engaging followers. In this day and age, people trust influencers more than their own family and friends.
49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations and will purchase the product after seeing it on their social media. This creates a huge opportunity for businesses to reach new audiences and influence big spenders such as millennials and Generation Z.
To take advantage of this, find influencers that match your industry and have followers who would be interested in your product/service. Ask them to promote your brand by posting about your product/service and giving honest reviews in exchange for special discount codes or free samples.
This will help boost your brand awareness to their massive following and is proven to drive up sales.
3. Turn your customers into brand ambassadors
Aside from influencers, you can also use real people to promote your products. In order to have a successful social media presence, people need to be talking and sharing about you.
Read Also: How to Reach Your Target Audience
Use your most passionate customers to review their experiences and promote your products in exchange for freebies or discounts. This will generate word of mouth marketing to their friends and families.
You could even use a referral brand ambassador program, where you give your loyal customers special referral codes and reward them with discounts whenever someone uses their referral code to purchase an item.
4. Encourage and feature user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is organic content created by your customers and followers on their social platforms. This could either be photos taken by them that features your product/service or content created by them for contests and giveaways.
By reposting these photos/videos, it shows the authenticity of your brand. According to Business Insider, customers that see user-generated content are 97% more likely to convert and purchase something than those who don’t.
People prefer user-generated content as they can easily relate to a customer like them, compared to a professional photo taken by the company. UGC is a great way to demonstrate social proof, the psychological and social phenomenon of people wanting to subconsciously copy the actions of others.
It is also a proven way to drive up sales.
5. Use interactive posts to educate and entice your customers
Remember to create valuable content that doesn’t always hardsell your product, but educates and engages customers instead. Unlike typical marketing efforts, social media marketing is totally different. Your followers need to see new entertaining content regularly.
If you think about it, people are mostly on social media during their free time, so they want to see posts that are entertaining instead of posts that are pushy and forces you to buy something.
If the posts are too “advertise-y”, people will scroll past it quickly. So you need to find a good balance between promoting your products and making content engaging.
Here are a few ways to do this:
- Create interactive content, such as contests or giveaways, causing people to comment
- Animated or cute photo/videos/GIFs
- Post photos or videos inspired by real-life situations
- Add in jokes/puns to create funny content
- Post content that includes recipes/tips for using your products
- Share photos of customers using or engaging with your products
