How to Increase Sales in a Bear Market

Have you noticed a chill in the air this December, in the weather and in your sales?

Use this small business marketing strategy to turn things around.

According to my Toronto based bookkeeper, this winter is forecast to be one of the coldest and snowiest of the last 15 years. That cold Canadian air seems to be spreading.

Here in New England, the bears are hibernating and so are many consumers. The financial sections of the paper have been forecasting lower levels of consumer spending all month, and debating whether or not we’re in a recession.

Has this affected your business? What should you do?

Marketing your business in an environment where your target market is spending less doesn’t make life any easier, but there is still plenty of money to be made. You can’t afford to hibernate, though, and just wait out the cold season.

One of my clients brokers construction loans. Over a year ago, when loans were still flying out the door, Ron decided to phase out his loan brokerage and specialize further in a market he knows well. He built a web site that generates leads for construction loans to firms all across the U.S.

By this past fall, when housing starts dropped precipitously, Ron had his new web site up and running. Even though the overall volume of construction loans was down, he now has a national reach instead of a local one, and has plenty of business – and income coming in.

How can you weather a bear market or a recession? Use this link to find out >>

Whatever else you do, don’t let pessimism get the best of you. There is opportunity in every market environment, but you’ll need a plan to take advantage of it. Here are two simple ideas you can use.

Market To A Larger Audience
One of the easiest ways to keep growing your business, even in a time of reduced spending, is to do what Ron did and market to a wider audience. If 20% fewer people in your target market are buying, but you’re marketing to twice as many people, your income could still go up by more than 50%.

A no-cost or low-cost way to do this is by join venture partnerships. Find a business that markets to your target market and get them to promote your products or services in return for your doing the same for them. Or work out a profit-sharing deal. [is this correct?]

Increase Your Conversion Rates
Do you wish you could generate more leads, close more sales and sell more to each client? What are you doing about it?

Let’s take a look at the four generic steps of website marketing:
1. Use a Google Ad to bring people to your web site
2. Generate a lead
3. Make a sale
4. Get clients to buy again.

What are your conversion rates for each of these steps?

Most web sites get dismal results from this process. If you own a typical website, only a fraction of a percent of site visitors contact you and an even smaller fraction buy from you.

Want to increase your online conversion rates and sales? Use this link >>

Increasing your conversion rates is a step-by-step process. I advised one client to make the changes below and she saw more than a tenfold increase in sales.
a. Rewrite the copy of your homepage to focus on the problem you solve for prospects.
b. Offer a freebie that your prospects can’t resist to get them to contact you.
c. Measure the conversion rate of each page on your site. Tune up each of the high-traffic pages so they convert visitors to leads and sales.
d. Set up a system of autoresponders to prompt your prospects to take the next step in your marketing sequence.

If your web site generated ten times as many leads, and your followup process converted twice as many of those leads into sales, how much more could you make, even in an economic slowdown?

Don’t let the talk of bear markets send you crawling into a cave or you’ll lose the interest of all your potential clients. Instead, implement a marketing strategy to grow your business all year long.

Interested in growing your business? Use this link >>

Charlie
Marketing Ideas That Make You Money