Confidence and strategy – the two things you need to create a successful sales campaign. Sales campaigns are used as a strategy to boost the sale of products and services in a limited amount of time. The purpose is to inch current leads closer to making their purchase or to grab new consumers’ attention to notice you and convince them to buy.

Check out this list of strategies and tips that will help you create a winning sales campaign.

1. Know who Your Audience is

Knowing your target audience is an essential part of creating and delivering a campaign, whether it’s a promotional campaign, marketing campaign, or sales campaign. Harvard Business found that 85% of 30,000 new product launches in the US failed to generate desired revenue due to poor market segmentation. Imagine where those products could be today had they used their money and resources to target the correct market.

There are many ways to find your audience. It does take some extra time and effort, but it will eventually pay off as marketers who have used segmentation in emails have seen a 760% increase in revenue. Learn how to find your target audience in Find Your Target Market.

2. Create Killer Content

Marketers have minimal time to grab the viewer’s attention. Those initial couple seconds make or break the consumer’s decision to interact. Creating killer content will ensure that the consumer is going to pay attention to your campaign.

To create effective content, you must think like your customers. Understand what they like, dislike, what they want out of a product – the values, benefits, features they look for in that product. Relevant content reflects an understanding of your consumer. Once you know your consumer, it’ll be much easier to create content that will grab their attention.

The best content is that of which the consumer can picture what it’s like to be a consumer you’ve already helped. Storytelling is becoming among the most popular type of content.

Know some facts:

• Subject lines with more than 3 words experience a drop in opening by over 60%. [ContactMonkey]
• Email marketing has a two times higher ROI than cold calling, networking or trade shows. [MarketingSherpa]
• 58% of your audience will stop watching video within the first 90seconds. [JoegGirard.ca]
• Viewers retain 58% of what they see but only 10% of what they read.
• After a presentation, 63% of attendees remember the stories told. Only 5% remember statistics. [Dan & Chip Heath]

3. Follow up

All your time and effort so far will go to waste if you don’t follow up with new and existing prospects. In the content consuming world we live in, consumers can often forget what they saw, which doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t interested.

Follow-ups can act as a reminder. With so much on everyone’s plate and lots of content to process daily, a nice reminder can often jump-start the person into action.

Follow-ups also allow you to gain an understanding of a consumer’s hesitation and work to persuade them otherwise. They build credibility and allows you to tell prospects more about your business rather than them finding information on their own.

Nurturing your prospect through the decision-making process gives you the advantage and helps you persuade them to make the final decision to buy.

4. Get Personal

An effective campaign will speak directly to the person’s wants and needs. This means you need to break your target market down even further. Create different content for different segments and get even more personalized for different targeting.

Micromarketing or one-to-one marketing is the most specific you can get, tailoring a product or service to suit an individual customer. While this would be best, it’s often not practical. That’s why we suggest using a concentrated targeting strategy. This strategy involves selecting a single, primary target market, and focusing all your energies on providing a product to fit that market’s needs.

Personalization is key. It makes the consumer feel like you care about their wants and needs. Something as simple as including their name in an email is personalized enough to increase the chances of them opening and engaging with your campaign.

5. Build familiarity

Design touchpoints around your target market to build familiarity and leverage yourself above others. Seeing your company here and there will create familiarity with your product/service in the consumer’s eye. While a consumer might not need your product or service at the time the touchpoints are delivered, it will stick with them and done right, reappear when you need it to most.

Consumers are more likely to buy products and services from companies they have seen before.

6. Use the data as you go

With automated reports and analytics, we can see our campaign progress in real-time. There is no more guessing or waiting months for results. Utilizing reports through social media, A/B testing, google analytics, etc. will help you improve your sales campaign.

Given enough data, you can adjust your campaign in real-time (make sure you’re getting, at the very least, three weeks of data before adjusting). Alter your approach, tweak your segmentation, and add new mediums to create an even better sales campaign.

Prepared to start a sales campaign but aren’t sure if it’s right for you? Check out the Advantages and Disadvantages of Sales Campaigns.