Businesses generally exist for the sole purpose of earning a profit for their owners and investors, typically by fulfilling a need or desire in their target consumers’ lives. So, it’s is no wonder that business owners are continually trying to find ways to increase their sales volumes as much as possible.
The marketing solutions and sales processes of acquiring new customers, getting existing customers to buy more, and maintaining overall loyalty to their products and services is a core function of any thriving business. Field marketing is a vital aspect of this, and the effective use of brand ambassadors and merchandisers can lead to authentic and sustainable growth in sales. More often than not, ineffective or non-existent marketing efforts have directly led to the collapse of companies, leaving in their wake a cautionary tale about the essential nature of this activity.
How to Increase Product Sales
Make the product benefits obvious
When consumers buy a product, their primary motivator is the knowledge of how that product will make their lives easier or more pleasant. The marketing of your product or service should primarily focus on how your consumer will enjoy the product or service.
For instance, when selling a smartphone, talking about the screen refresh rate, processor, battery capacity, and graphical processing unit will leave most consumers either disengaged or entirely put off by the technobabble.
Instead, those features should be translated to benefits such as the ability to talk to their friends and family for longer, enjoy better quality music, or play high-quality video games with impressive console-level graphics. Brand ambassadors are particularly effective at achieving this through interpersonal communication, which humanizes a brand and exposes the product’s benefits in a way that is intuitive to the consumer.
Understand your consumer
Defining your primary target market as precisely as possible is a critical step in crafting an effective marketing strategy. All too often, businesses direct their marketing to as general an audience as possible, in the hopes of capturing more sales. This has the unfortunate effect of spreading the marketing campaign very thin and muffling its impact. A focused campaign with a well-defined primary audience will speak to the consumer’s specific needs, desires and aspirations by communicating with them on an emotional level.
When consumers feel seen by a brand, their perception of the brand improves, which leads them to make a purchase. The intelligence gathered by field marketing agents such as merchandisers and mystery shoppers can help a brand get a more on-the-ground understanding of their prospective and existing customers.
Understand the market
Understanding the market involves insight into your competitors and consumers. Market research should be the first step of any campaign strategy. It enables a business to make accurate predictions about the performance of products and services before the campaign launches, which helps fine-tune the campaign to address any concerns in the market. Businesses armed with data from market research can then start to think about positioning. This entails defining your brand voice and distinguishing yourself from your competitors. When consumers have a clear and distinct reason to choose your product over your competitors, it tends to improve sales and create customer loyalty.
How does brand awareness impact product sales?
Brand awareness is a consumer’s familiarity with a brand’s products or services. This occurs on a spectrum from completely oblivious of the brand’s existence to an intimate knowledge of all the products’ features and benefits. It may not be plausible to make every consumer an obsessive fanatic of your products and services. Still, it is possible to make your brand ubiquitous in your desired sphere of influence. Field marketing representatives are extremely valuable to increasing brand awareness. They interact with your prospective and existing customers for much longer than they would with an advert or non-interactive promotional material, and the impression they leave is significantly greater and longer-lasting.
The most desirable level of brand recognition is the use of your brand name as a verb, a catch-all name for all the products in your niche or a yardstick for quality. This level of brand awareness becomes self-propagating. A classic example if this is the brand Google, whose brand became so synonymous with search engines that it became a verb that means to look something up online. This makes it easier for internet users to seek out Google as a trusted search engine. By extension, they will then use the suite of online tools, products and services that Google offers; from entertainment on YouTube to managing the household grocery budget in Google Sheets. By building that level of ubiquity, Google redefined the internet and made its paid tools the most obvious choice for developers and businesses. Google successfully leveraged its features and benefits with effective branding and marketing to drive their product sales.
How can your business leverage field marketing to increase product sales?
Field marketing is a highly effective method of increasing brand awareness and driving product sales. A large part of its effectiveness is the amount of human interaction involved, making it very useful for building strong, long-lasting relationships with consumers. Field marketing is so effective at boosting sales because of a psychological phenomenon known as propinquity, in which people are more likely to become friends with or form romantic relationships with people they see often. The phenomenon extends beyond interpersonal relationships and makes people more likely to purchase and be loyal, to brands they see regularly.
There are a few simple ways in which your business can use field marketing to harness the propinquity effect and increase product sales. Firstly, it is important to identify where your target consumers are most likely to interact with your brand and make those spaces as frictionless as possible.
This can be achieved with retail execution solutions, which ensures: constantly-filled shelves at the optimum height; product demonstration stands near or in retail outlets where consumers can sample your product just before they make a purchasing choice; or brand activations, which create interactive experiences for your consumers.
Another way to harness this phenomenon is to provide helpful information. This establishes trust and authority. People tend to trust honest sources of information and the authority, in this case, is expertise, which people are likely to respect instead of poor information. The execution for this could be the deployment of brand ambassadors, who are visible on the shop floor and are ready to help prospective customers understand all the features and benefits of a product. The most effective ambassadors would seek to understand the consumers’ needs first and then recommend the product most useful to them or highlight features out of which they would get the most use.
A powerful way to improve brand awareness and increase product sales using the propinquity effect is the use of a multi-layered field marketing campaign to connect with consumers through multiple channels. For instance, a brand activation could be executed outside a retail center, supported by a brand ambassador providing a friendly face instore and a merchandiser ensuring the product is displayed as attractively as possible on shelves.
The power of familiarity is often overlooked in marketing campaigns, and people often feel the need to go for a hard sell in every interaction with the consumer. This is based on the misconception that a sale must be demanded in every interaction when, in fact, it pays more in the long term to build a relationship before trying to get the consumer to part with their hard-earned money.
Conclusion
Increasing product sales is a heavily consumer-centric process. Businesses that are designed to place the customer first will grow organically and see greater returns on their marketing and sales expenditure. It is vital to the growth and survival of a business that it prioritizes brand awareness to create and foster long-lasting relationships with loyal customers. One of the ideal ways to achieve brand awareness is to leverage field marketing, which also happens to be an excellent way to drive product sales.
Do you want to know how Samplex Africa can assist you in increasing your sales? Please get in touch with us. A new brand experience is waiting for you.