We recently asked our leading executives how they use online content to generate sales.
Here are their responses...
Percy Leon, Digital Media Content Executive
As a YouTube content creator, there are several ways to use your online content to generate sales.
You can monetize your content as a YouTube content creator, focus on providing value to your audience, and build a loyal community.
You can use this as influential marketing. According to Influential Marketing Hub, the influencer marketing industry is set to reach a value of $16.4 billion in 2022, representing an 18.8% increase from the $13.8 billion valuation in 2021.
Brands are increasingly turning to smaller creators, such as nano and micro-influencers with strong subscriber engagement and trust, as it can be more effective and cost-efficient than paying larger influencers.
Also, high-quality, informative, and engaging content can attract and retain viewers and lead to revenue streams through:
- Sponsorships
- Advertising
- Affiliate marketing
- Merchandise sales
- Coaching
Lynn Holland, VP Sales & Business Development
Image from Bigstock
In March 2020, I was selling enterprise technology when a final demo to secure my last endorsements and purchase approval for a large sale was canceled. Corporate travel was banned, fear converged, and modern buyers emerged with new expectations for finding, evaluating, and making tech buying decisions.
They now resisted mercilessly being spammed and chased with a phone, email, hollow marketing materials, and time-consuming sales journeys, and were no longer accessible with in-person meetings and tradeshows to prospect and further sales.
Instead, they expected vendors to generously publish surprisingly insightful content on social networks where they natively hang out to:
- Source information
- Get recommendations and validation from trusted peers
- Anonymously self-educate, evaluate, compare, and gain confidence in the credibility of vendors/solutions
THEN
Visit a strategically designed vendor website to binge on a full library of UNGATED content.
THEN
Submit a web form or make a call, WELL into their buyer journey to VOLUNTARILY self-identify where they found you, became a high-intent buyer, and were led to:
- Recognize they had a problem
- See you as a potential solution to their problem
- Prepare internally to engage you in a buying initiative
So how can you use content to build high-intent buyers who WANT what you have to offer?
- Build deep insights that serve your audience with value - non-obvious solutions to obvious problems or obvious solutions to non-obvious problems that you provide to save money, make money, or reduce risk in days or weeks vs. months or years
- Perpetually embed them into a variety of content pieces and publish them on social networks where your ICP hangs out
- Make networking a priority and serve them by sharing your insights and value without asking for anything
- Offer a quality free resource with your insights and value in your content and website/landing page with no strings attached
- Make sure your site is clear, concise, full of ungated content, and guides high-intent followers into a low-friction process to demo, try, or buy your offering
Lynn Holland is a business development executive with 18+ years of experience taking operational, IoT & retail technologies, products, & consumer engagement to market with a focus in petroleum & convenience retail.
Ana Smith, Talent Architect & Global Learning Strategist
Image from Bigstock
From my perspective, online content is such a powerful tool that can be used to generate sales. By creating and sharing high-quality content, you can attract attention, build relationships, and drive traffic to your website or online store.
Based on my experience, these are some ideas on how to use online content to generate sales:
- Creating valuable content that solves problems. The best way to generate sales with online content is to create content that solves problems for your target audience. This could be in the form of blog posts, articles, videos, or infographics. When you create content that is helpful and informative, people will be more likely to trust you and buy from you.
- Sharing your content on social media. Social media is a great way to share your content with a large audience. Make sure to share your content on the social media platforms that your target audience is active on. You can also use social media to run contests and giveaways, which can help to generate excitement and buzz around your brand.
- Promoting your content through email marketing. Email marketing is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and promote your latest content. You can send out email newsletters, or you can send targeted emails to people who have shown an interest in your products or services.
- Using paid advertising to promote your content. Paid advertising can be a great way to reach a larger audience with your content. You can use paid advertising on social media, search engines, or other websites.
- Tracking your results and making adjustments as needed. It's important to track the results of your online content marketing efforts so that you can see what's working and what's not. You can use Google Analytics to track website traffic, and you can use social media analytics tools to track social media engagement. Once you know what's working, you can make adjustments to your strategy to improve your results.
Kathryn Marshburn, Music Program Manager
Image from Bigstock
The data is undeniable that large amounts of quality social media posting and increased posting frequency is the key to successful sales. Some of those strategies are free and some are not. Here are three top thoughts to increase online sales with content:
1. Awareness campaigns
Most online sales strategies can be distributed for free through social media, where you can create content for awareness campaigns without having to pay for it. Having music artists post on their Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook accounts would be a great place to start advertising your music product with consistency and frequency for new music drops as well as merchandise.
My advice is a very practical approach.
Nobody here today, in 2023, is confused that people’s attention sits on social media…at scale. It just does and will continue to do so in the future. Sometimes, businesses confuse a business strategy on social media with a human perspective and opinion of social media.
The consumer you are trying to reach is not super concerned with your personal take on how you feel about what 13-year-old is trending on TikTok. Consumers don’t care how much you like or dislike Facebook. Your consumers are surfing around on socials, living their life, seeing things, and spending their money. Most successful online sales stories do have a connection to social media and embracing the concept is important for music teams so that the messaging aligns with specific awareness posts for future music initiatives as a baseline.
2. Placing social media ads
Let's strategize against what the consumer is actually seeing and the reality of the sales process. Sales today does connect to social media in every way and ads that come across your feed allow you to reach more eyes. Yes, placing ads, within a reasonable budget, will be effective in increasing sales. Research should prevail before ads are placed to make sure the target audience is receiving the ads and the correct buyer is being targeted. The reality is that the consumer is online, therefore leveraging ads in front of those customers is essential.
For music artists, aiming for Gen Z and millennials has proven successful as research supports that a large percentage of time spent by this demo is searching for new music artists. Where are they searching? Blogs, articles, banners, and festivals. Placing ads in these specific verticals will be effective in driving music sales.
3. Increasing the frequency of your social media posts
The data is undeniable: more frequent posting is guaranteed to increase sales. Recommended volume for posting should circulate around 12 creative posts per day, per platform. Posting on LinkedIn, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Those companies that do not enjoy the grind of posting at a large volume may not survive. Hire a social media team if you must...but posting now is the baseline for successful sales. People that are outflanking in posting cadence are winning exponentially. People that are out-posting others are picking up market share by the simple fact that there is just too much attention on these 5-7 platforms.
Find your cadence and post quality, and aim for 8-12 posts per day.
Kathryn Marshburn has spent 12+ years in the music and gaming industries guiding teams on identifying targeted goals with an agile approach resulting in driving revenue and reducing risk.
How do you use online content to generate sales? Join the conversation inside Work It Daily's Executive Program.
