SALES & MARKETING SELLING IN THE NEW NORMAL
Where Businesses Should Focus This Year to Recapture Sales With suggested tools that will make the biggest impact BY THOMAS J. ARMITAGE, SITE-SEEKER, INC.
W Tom Armitage is part of the sales team at Site-Seeker, a boutique digital marketing agency based in Upstate NY. He earned his master’s in integrated marketing communication from West Virginia University and bachelor’s in public relations from Utica College of Syracuse University. After holding marketing/PR roles at Sovena and Overit, Tom joined the Site-Seeker team in 2013.
88 • Fall 2021
ith COVID behind us, it’s time to re-focus on our pre-pandemic priorities. For most of us, that’s back to the old grind: finding ways to generate more sales and more revenue for our companies. The past 18 months were tough on many companies. Sales and marketing is the best place to start when looking to make the most significant impact on your bottom line. Here are five areas to focus on to generate more sales this year.
LOCAL OPTIMIZATION Featured Tool: Yext For local companies or multi-unit operations with storefronts, local optimization is extremely important. With so many businesses closing down, pausing efforts, changing hours of operations, requiring new protocols, the online listing world (i.e., websites that give out business information) was an absolute mess. Business owners neglected to update their listing pages, so when consumers Googled, they found outdated misinformation. Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp, Bing Places, and TripAdvisor are some of the more prominent names, but there are actually dozens of directory sites that consumers use. As a business owner, it’s important to have full control over these listings and keep them up-to-date at all times. A tool like Yext can help. And local optimization doesn’t stop with just listings management. Information on your website and ensuring your site is applicable for relevant Google searches is equally important.
Google can contribute to more than 50% of a business’s traffic (and ultimately sales!). Build out location pages on your website and improve your website so customers in each of your local markets can easily find you and buy from you.
SOCIAL SELLING Featured Tool: LinkedIn Sales Navigator Venues are open. Events are being held. But not everything will go completely back to normal. Knowing some folks will be forever skittish with in-person events, you may need to expect lower turnouts at trade shows and accept that you won’t get as many leads from those outings. You should also be mindful of the many companies that have gone partially or fully remote and have reduced travel budgets as a result. One way to compensate is through social selling or, using social media to support your sales efforts. Look at it as an extension of your company’s ongoing marketing and sales efforts. The only difference is: it’s you. It’s your profile, it’s your comments, it’s your content, it’s your personal brand, it’s your direct messages, it’s your responsibility. Use a prospecting tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator. From there, find appropriate folks in your target audience and connect. Give them a reason to accept. Create content and educate your users. Talk about what you know and keep it relevant based on what you sell, what your company stands for, and what you stand for. Comment and interact. It’s important to be
