5 Tips to Use Ads, AI, and Social Media to Supercharge Your Sales
Ads, AI, and social media have become the holy trinity of sales. Perfecting all three will help you become an unbeatable sales master whose path leads only to excellence. The road can be bumpy when you’re just starting out, but even the greatest masters were once apprentices. Patience, resilience, drive, and the following tips will help you reach your goals and supercharge your sales.
There are numerous tactics for boosting sales, some more effective than others. Unless you’re just starting out, it’s safe to say you’ve already used some tried-and-true methods to keep your sales high. But times are evolving; new technologies keep emerging; consumer behavior and needs keep changing; all this is pushing you to transform as well.
Gone are the times when a few cold calls and some direct mail were enough to get your sales going. Today, it’s all about social media, online ads, and artificial intelligence.
Here are the top ways to leverage all three and take your sales to a whole new level.
Use the Right Ad Formats
Before starting any ad campaign, you need to determine your audience, budget, and schedule. Once you figure those out, you need to choose the right ad format.
The ad format you’ll choose depends on your campaign’s objectives and the platform where you’ll place an ad.
The ad formats you can choose from include:
- Image
- Video
- Slideshow
- Lead
- Carousel
- Collection
- Instant Experience (Facebook)
Images, videos, and slideshows are pretty self-explanatory. All are excellent for raising brand awareness and capturing leads, but videos have the greatest power.
If you plan on creating video ads, have in mind that 95% of consumers watch videos with the sound off. So, utilise captions to increase your chances of generating leads.
So, lead ads are those that automatically open a contact form to collect people’s names, email addresses, and other necessary information.
Carousel ads let you combine up to 10 images or videos in one ad. They’re great for telling a story or promoting various products (each can have a separate CTA).
A collection ad features an image, video, or slideshow that matches the chosen images of your products. By clicking on such an ad, people can instantly start browsing your catalog and buying your products.
Instant experience ads are available only on Facebook. They’re designed for mobiles and feature a full-screen landing page. You can combine them with all these other ad formats.
Leverage Chatbots to Capture and Convert Leads
Chatbots are AI-powered virtual assistants that you should integrate into every channel you use. You can even design them on your own, with no coding knowledge whatsoever, as there are many tools with pre-built templates. You simply customize one to your brand and deploy it on any platform you want.
Chatbots can carry out intelligent conversations 24/7, with hundreds of users simultaneously. Thanks to machine learning and NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology, they learn from their interactions and can understand the context behind every word.
They can be your customer service superheroes who are always on call. If someone contacts you in the middle of the night on any channel, your bot will be there to instantly offer a helping hand. It can really redefine customer engagement.
Of course, your customer service needs human touch too. That’s where AI comes in because it can recognise when a chatbot needs to transfer the conversation to a human agent. A bot can then notify the right person to handle a question or issue and capture or convert a lead.
Promote on Social Like a Pro
Everyone’s on social media, so how can you stand out? You know you need to share relevant, useful, and exciting content, but how to drive more engagement?
You need to get personal. Interact with your followers daily, just like you do with friends. Show them you’re not just a brand, but rather a part of their community.
Ask questions, create polls, spark discussions, ask for feedback, and always be positive and highly-responsive to all comments and messages.
Don’t forget that timing is everything, so post at optimal times. Start collaborating with influencers, too, as they have the power to influence people’s purchasing decisions. With the right strategy, they can get your sales spiking in no time.
Create Lead Quizzes for Social Media
Lead quizzes can go viral on social media and help you attract and convert a global audience. So, it’s always a good time to utilize a quiz generator and start crafting awesome lead quizzes.
When you create an online quiz that’s relevant to your audience’s needs, they’ll flock to your website to see what results they’ll get. The key is to match the results with your company’s offerings so that you can naturally suggest your products or services based on people’s personalities or anything else that works.
Be sure to integrate an opt-in email form to display before the results so that you can capture your leads. You can then follow up and guide them to the end of your sales funnel.
However, let it be optional to prevent people from bouncing back. After all, you’ll have a compelling CTA in the quiz results.
Track, Split Test and Analyse the Results
You need to determine your KPIs to track and analyze all your efforts literally. Utilize the right tools for generating in-depth reports on ad campaigns and your social media marketing.
If you don’t measure the results, you won’t know what works and what doesn’t. You can’t rely on guessing, because you need the numbers to pinpoint what may need a bit of adjustment.
The most important thing you can do is split test both your ads and your social posts. You’ll determine which versions drive more engagement and generate more leads, so you’ll know how to boost your sales.
Conclusion
Every business is unique and follows different marketing strategies, but these tactics work for everyone. Of course, you need to insert your own voice, your unique value proposition, and lots of other unique elements into your marketing. But following these tips will help you stand out and take a huge step towards supercharging your sales.