Sell through digital marketing

Roberto Cortez, specialist in digital marketing and author of the book  Learn to sell with digital marketing 

If I believe that selling with digital marketing is an art? A science, even? I believe. Selling with digital marketing can be extremely profitable and scalable, regardless of the business area. But while it may seem easy, it is not. Simple perhaps, if certain assumptions that I will talk about throughout this article are respected and there is resilience, passion and mindset on the part of the entrepreneur.

An online business, for me, is really a business, when it has sales method, predictability and consistency. And in this sense, scaling an online business necessarily involves these three pillars:

• Sell ​​more of my products to new customers (CAC metric);
• Sell ​​more to current customers (LTV metric);
• Increase the average transaction ticket (AOV metric).

CAC, LTV and AOV are the three key metrics of your business, and that all entrepreneurs need to have at their fingertips.

CAC is your customer acquisition cost. Do you know which one is yours? Do you know your maximum CAC for you to have a sustainable and predictable business? You have to know.

LTV, or lifetime value , is the expected billing value with a customer, throughout their journey as a customer (this could mean months or years, if the cycle is really long and there is a lot of repeat purchases). If your business LTV is lower than the CAC, it goes without saying that you are losing money.

Finally, the AOV or average order value , will dictate what your maximum CAC could be. By increasing the AOV, you can increase the CAC.

From these three metrics derive many other important ones such as conversion rate, churn rate , CPC, etc.

When we talk about sales through digital marketing, we are talking about the different digital channels and strategies that allow us to reach the customer and, consequently, lead him to purchase. There are multiple variables that you must consider when you intend to sell through digital marketing, which can even be interpreted almost as an ecosystem: you, the audience and persona , the content you create, the copy and the offer, the product or service, online advertising, the website, store or capture page.

To talk to you about sales through digital marketing, I will first give you some reasons why you should do it compared to a purely physical business :

1. There are no geographic barriers – you reach potential customers regardless of where they are;
2. You sell without depending on yourself or the opening hours of the store;
3. You can scale your business with greater predictability to different markets;
4. You can test and learn much faster – the testing methodology we apply in digital marketing allows us to understand where we are going wrong and what can be improved. The speed with which things happen in digital is at the speed of a “dog year”, that is, it seems that one digital year represents seven physical years. And this speed of proof-of-concept through testing puts you years ahead of your local competition.

But, be careful, to sell on a scale and on a recurring basis with digital marketing you have to create an offer that you can't refuse. Your client must feel that he will receive much more than what he will pay, he must see your product or service as an “opportunity”. Therefore, in this sense, it is essential that you communicate the benefits and transformation that come from the purchase in a simple and clear way, giving the customer several reasons to buy.

As for websites, pages and online stores, these are fundamental, yes, when it comes to “sales with digital marketing”. But it's not enough to create a page and wait for the magic to happen. The page must have a strategy, clear alignment with what you communicate on other channels and follow a series of good practices. He interprets it as a board game: people have to know exactly what the next step is, it has to be clear what is expected of them. Never assume that the customer knows what he wants, that he knows your product perfectly, or that he has time to research all your channels. Put the most important information together on a sales page and drive traffic there.

Selling with digital marketing involves a lot of work, testing and resilience. As I said, it's a complex ecosystem that you have to know to make sure you can sell and scale your business online. You have to know your numbers, be realistic about your goals, create an offer you can't refuse, find your audience and put together strategies to reach them, understand which channels you will be able to leverage sales, anyway, I could go on with more assumptions.

Each case is different, but for me, any business can scale digital sales if the assumptions I mentioned here are applied. If you're one of those people who regularly say “but in my business it's different”, I only have one final piece of advice for you: don't be the bottleneck in your business, don't limit it by what you know today.

Good sales.