As a business owner, you should know that marketing and sales go hand in hand. The more you invest in marketing and sales efforts, the more likely your business is to succeed.

However, investing in an ineffective marketing campaign or sales method will not bring the desired results, no matter the time or money invested. That is why you should be highly selective of the strategies you use in your campaigns.

Let’s take a look at some innovative methods and strategies that you can use in the upcoming year.

Place special emphasis on Instagram stories

More than 1 billion people use Instagram monthly, and around 500 million people use Instagram Stories every single day. These numbers clearly indicate that as a platform, it provides many opportunities that marketers can use to their advantage.

For instance, the vast majority of Instagram users follow a brand account. Think about this, and you will realize that there is an amazing chance to connect with them.

As a business, you can influence your audience directly and indirectly. Instagram Stories are not only meant for paid ads, so posting about your product for those who already follow you is also an important part of the marketing strategy.

By nurturing your audience, you can convert them into loyal customers, but keep in mind that paid ads are also effective since they can help you gain immediate sales or increase the general interest. The Swipe Up feature leads to your landing or pricing page, and once your visitors swipe up, they become warm leads.

Finally, know that social media algorithms are always changing, and that is why your effort to maintain consistent engagement with the audience is crucial.

Social selling and its importance

Social selling is done on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and so on. Social selling refers to every action on social media taken by salespeople with the aim of finding and engaging with new prospects.

Sales agents use social media to provide value to prospects by answering questions, responding to comments, and sharing interesting content, and all these interactions have become very important nowadays.

They should cover all stages from the buying journey, from awareness to consideration, until a prospect is ready to purchase. But how should you approach social selling?

Well, since this is about building relationships, you first need to choose the right platform. For instance, that can be Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or some other network.

Try to learn more about your target audience and their preferred networks. Once you do that, make sure that your business has a presence there.

When you establish your business’s online presence on social media, start following the most notable followers. For example, try to find discussions about your brand and feel free to contribute. Also, instead of just following regular people, follow other companies from your industry as well.

Additionally, provide extra value with interesting and useful content. People will be glad to see new tutorial videos or articles where they can learn something new or gain something for free.

Finally, make sure that you measure your results with reliable social media analytics tools. Such a tool should give you an insight into the efficiency of your efforts as well as whether you need to change something in your approach.

The power of geotargeting

You are probably wondering what geotargeting is and why you should use it.

Geotargeting has become one of the best ways to connect with your target audience on a deeper level since it allows users to personalize their content, promotions, and special offers in a way that drives more revenue.

This is a marketing strategy where your business creates unique messages, ads, or promotions for specific parts of its audience based on their location.

Take a look at some major benefits of geotargeting:

• Build better relationships with customers. Geotargeting allows people to personalize the UX to address where they are located.
• Create better promotions. Some promotional deals only make financial sense for certain locations, and geotargeting opens up new avenues for creating special offers that attract more customers;
• Increase your sales. By personalizing your content, you will appeal to a wider audience and earn more revenue that way.

Keep in mind that geotargeting, in most cases, rely on the user’s IP address. The user’s IP address is tracked so that their location can be revealed, and this determines whether a specific ad, campaign, or offer will appear.

Business intelligence tools

Business intelligence serves as the foundation for business strategy, short-term or long-term.

BI is used as a universal phrase since it doesn’t apply to any specific type of analysis. Instead, it refers to the business intelligence tools and processes used to extract insights from raw data to aid in business decision making.

Organizations leverage this data to gain an edge over competitors and optimize overall performance. That is why business intelligence tools are important, as they allow analysts to easily convert raw data into meaningful statistics.

For example, if your business is B2B, it can make use of software tools such as ZoomInfo, which is a popular business intelligence tool that provides accurate and actionable B2B contact and company intelligence to help businesses speed up growth and profitability.

However, the company has recently increased its prices, so many of its clients have started looking for an alternative to this tool. Before you make a final decision on what BI tool you want to use, take a look at ZoomInfo pricing and its alternatives to get a better idea of the right tool for your business.

Optimize for voice search

Voice searches are becoming increasingly present thanks to new gadgets such as Amazon Alexa and Echo. On top of that, consumers have realized that they no longer have to type in anything to actually initiate a search. They can just talk to a device and get the job done.

Also, numerous studies state that in the upcoming year, more than half of the search results will be through voice searches. Therefore, it would be wise to start optimizing the content you push for voice search as soon as possible.

To make your content searchable through voice technology, you should:

• Determine voice keywords
• Add FAQs and sprinkle those questions all over your content
• Use long-tail keywords
• Use voice technology for local searches
• Make sure the page loads fast

Final thoughts

Your business has to be ready for changes if you want to succeed in this hypercompetitive environment. Effective marketing requires keeping up with the trends and constantly improving the strategies to better suit the audience’s preferences.

In addition, it is essential to use the latest tools that allow you to better connect with the audience and monitor industry rivals.

Every new day is another chance and a new opportunity to improve. If you don’t realize this on time, your business will lag behind the rest. So, put in the necessary work and try to outperform your competition in 2021.