Marketing analytics tools continue to change the way we advertise businesses.

Before digital marketing, brands and agencies were spending far more on their advertising campaigns in exchange for very little feedback. Smaller businesses with less budget to work with could not benefit from the additional exposure to help business growth.

With the advent of digital marketing tools and techniques, brands can now approach a level playing field. Even a small, local company can reliably drive business growth with the help of marketing analytics tools.

Here are four ways that analytics can help your business grow successfully.

1. Marketing Analytics Tools Improve Your ROI with Direct Feedback

Free-to-use platforms such as Google Analytics have effectively taken all of the guesswork out of digital advertising. Even paid ad platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads support all of your work with constant analytical feedback.

Whether you're choosing the right image for an ad, working on the perfect headline, or writing copy for your home page, marketing analytics tools can help you improve.

These digital advertising platforms allow you to keep track of vital metrics including page visits, bounce rate, average session duration, click-through rate, and much more. You can even leverage marketing heat maps to see where on the page users tend to look and which areas they're skipping.

Even when you are unable to precisely pinpoint an issue, your analytics will provide enough feedback to help you construct a better marketing product. You can and should A/B test several versions of an ad or website page to see which performs better with your target audience. You'll be able to actively study what visitors enjoy and what they don't want to see from your brand.

Provided that you actively monitor and engage with your analytics, improvements to your ROI are virtually assured. Even if your early campaigns do not boast huge sales numbers, the feedback you're purchasing is a sound investment in your business's future growth.

2. The Ability to Create Personalized Advertisements

One drawback to the accessibility of digital marketing is that audiences are inundated with advertisements daily. If you simply hit publish on a generic ad and landing page for your campaign, you shouldn't expect to see many conversions.

However, one of the many benefits of analytics tools is the ability to discern more vital information from your target audience. As you gather enough data, you can begin to segment your target audience into specific groups. This allows your company to create highly-personalized advertisements to increase your CTR and CVR.

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This is vital as each individual in your target audience is at a different stage of the buyer's journey. Some may be uneasy at the idea of spending cash and simply want to gather information. Meanwhile, others may be on the verge of checkout, but abandon the process for some undefined reason. You wouldn't approach these two individuals with the same sales tactics in real life, so your marketing should also reflect this.

With marketing analytics tools, you can create content to help consumers make smart purchasing decisions. You can meet undecided buyers at their level and send follow-up emails personalized with their name and email. Your company can also publish email marketing lists that are exclusive to recurring customers.

When the customer feels a personal connection with your brand, there's a far greater chance of achieving a conversion. The more conversions you obtain, the more data you have to drive future marketing decisions, which drive business growth to new levels.

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3. Marketing Analytics Make It Easier to Find New Leads

As a customer moves from the discovery stage to the buying stage, your brand can gather a wealth of information. When you obtain a satisfying number of customers, you'll have enough of a sample size to draw meaningful conclusions about your marketing as well as your customer interests.

With this analytical data, you can utilize digital marketing platforms to rapidly discover and connect with new leads. In the paid ads world, this is sometimes referred to as targeting lookalike audiences.ā

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These new potential leads share similar attributes to previous or existing customers. Because your marketing analytics already helped you curate an effective strategy, you can reuse similar techniques to reach new customers with little additional effort. Your previous investment is rewarded by allowing you to spend less on new customer acquisition.

Typically, it can cost as much as five times more to obtain new customers than it is to retain existing ones. However, your business cannot grow without expanding its customer base. By utilizing your marketing analytics tools, you can achieve this growth while keeping your expenses low.

4. Achieve Growth by Keeping Tabs on Competitors

Your analytics not only provide personal company insights but can help you see the latest activities from your closest competitors online. Your marketing analytics tools will help you with this in a variety of ways.

First, you can look at competitor websites that rank higher than yours for the same targeted keywords. This helps you focus your vision on the specific sites and web pages that are utilizing more effective copy, graphics, or techniques.

You can use this study to take note of what you can change or implement within your website or advertisements. Alternatively, you can rule out specific keyword targets that are victims of a bidding war and seek new routes for obtaining qualified traffic. Oftentimes, the strategy is not to simply burn your budget by outbidding the competition, but by capitalizing on unique angles that suit your business and differentiate you from other results.

Companies can also utilize their marketing analytics to see the exact number of clicks and average estimated ROI competitors are getting for the same keywords. This will assist in gaining a better understanding of marketing costs so that you can modify your strategy according to your budget.

As a final note, know that all of your competitors are already taking advantage of marketing analytics tools for these same reasons. You must adapt to new technologies and expand your knowledge if you want your brand to survive and remain competitive for the years to come.

Business Growth is Achievable for Any Brand with Marketing Analytics

The benefits of marketing analytical tools cannot be ignored. Not only are the insights imperative for creating effective ads, but they also make digital marketing far more cost-effective than any traditional advertising method.

With these marketing analytics tools, you never waste your budget simply for the hopes of potential exposure. The constant feedback loop will serve as your blueprint of what to do and what to avoid when creating your new web pages, paid ad campaigns, or even social media posts. Everything a visitor does or does not do is recorded for your observation.

However, while these digital marketing platforms do the heavy lifting of collecting the data, you still need to remain active. With a capable digital marketing manager at the helm, you can turn your investment in analytics into your key for dependable business growth.

If you're looking to breakthrough in the digital marketing world, you need a solid digital agency business plan.

There are no secret tricks, shortcuts, or techniques to help you accomplish this. It's going to require a team effort, hours of forethought, and an agile mindset to do it right. If you aren't prepared to get your hands dirty with research and cold, hard numbers, you should rethink your plans to start a business.

If that hasn't scared you away, then it's time to get to work. While we can't do the work for you, we can provide you with a marketing agency business plan template to follow. Take these broader strokesĀ and carefully consider how each category applies to you and your future team.

Step 1 - Define the Business

When creating your digital agency business plan, you need to ask the core questions. When it comes to the business itself, you should be considering:

• What is the business?
• Who is it for?
• Why does the business exist?
• Where will you market and sell your services?
• How will you make all of this happen?

When it comes to defining your new digital marketing agency, you want to focus on the who, what, and why of the matter.

Making money is not a sufficient reason as this is the primary purpose of all businesses. Making a profit is not enough of a motivator to guarantee that your agency will succeed.

The services offered by a business are also not what defines a business and what helps it succeed. There are thousands of digital marketing agencies available. In an industry where location is ultimately irrelevant, you need to offer your customers something more than paid ads, content, and SEO.

A digital marketing agency exists to solve the unique problems that businesses face when striving for growth and customer connection. Your primary business goal should be aligned to help your target audience solve the specific problems they face that may or may not be unique to other potential audiences.

To help gain a better understanding of what your new digital agency business is and why it exists, you’ll need to perform the following:

• Name the business
• Create a mission statement (why does the business exist and who are we helping)
• List your company’s defining values and motivators

With a better visualization of your company’s goals and values, you’ll then have a framework to start building. To achieve your vision, you’ll need to consider the individuals you’ll need to partner with and hire to make it all possible.

• Define the management hierarchy and their titles/responsibilities
• Company structure for future employees
• Expected salary/benefit structure for each employee hired

When it comes to your employees, you shouldn’t plan for just the initial hire. The talent you’ll want to acquire is already active in the industry and will be looking for competitive compensation packages that scale with their time invested.

You don’t want to start your new digital agency out with a high turnover rate, so you should plan out scaling compensation over years 1-3 using Paystub Hero. Not only will this give you an accurate view of your payroll expenses, but it will help you with the hiring and onboarding process.

Step 2 - Define the Customer

Like any business, your digital agency can't survive without a steady flow of new clients and customers. However, you'll benefit more from targeting a specific, ideal customer that happens to benefit most from your business specifically. The more refined your planned targeting is, the easier time you will have landing new sales when the time comes.

Thankfully, we already started this process by defining your digital agency’s reason for existing in step one. You should already have a specific audience in mind, whether this happens to be:

• Individual persons / self-employed individuals
• Small businesses
• Other marketing / SaaS companies
• Corporations

Your ideal client doesn't have to be confined to any of these suggested categories. However, you can already begin to understand how our business plan will change depending on whom we intend to primarily serve.

Not only should the company service platform be designed for that customer, but it will define our sales and marketing efforts in future steps.

Bonus - Define Who You DON'T Want as a Customer

A strong digital agency business plan will also benefit from defining those who will not benefit from your offerings.

Of course, you need not list the obvious. Your digital agency will provide little to no assistance to the average working consumer.

Instead, you need to eliminate audiences early that may be tangentially related to your offerings. For example, DashClicks exists to serve other digital marketing agencies, SaaS companies, hosts, coaches, and directories. While small businesses can benefit from digital marketing services, they are not our primary clientele based upon our decided business plan.

This allows us to better engineer our offerings package as well as our digital advertising and sales efforts. With a clear vision of our ideal customer, all of our business efforts trend in that direction. We avoid wasting time, effort, and expenses on leads that aren't truly aligned with what we have to provide.

Do the same with your business plan. Know who you want to do business with and whom you want to avoid.

Step 3 - Define the Services

While you've likely generated an idea of what your digital agency's services will look like, it's time to nail down definitions.

For this step of your marketing agency business plan, you’ll want to address the following:

• What are the core service offerings?
• What type of talent will you need to hire to sell these services?
• What will it cost for your company to provide these services?
• What can/should you charge for these services?
• When can your business expect to turn a profit?

Going through each potential service step-by-step should naturally help you curate your company's unique offerings. If your cost-benefit analysis determines that service will cost more than you can expect to earn, you may need to eliminate it from your platform. Alternatively, you can choose to postpone that offering for now and revisit the matter a year from now.

Each service your agency provides should be critical in helping your target client solve the problems they face in business. This may also help you realize services you need to include that you have not already considered.

You may choose to position your agency to specialize in specific services or to offer a comprehensive, complete package. Agencies around the globe find success with either strategy. As long as your services align with your company's mission statement and work to satisfy your desired client, you will be golden.

Step 4 - Defining the Sales Process

Thus far in our digital agency business plan, we have:

• Defined our new digital agency
• Identified our ideal customer
• Curated a cost-effective service platform that serves our audience

With these factors, we have nearly realized a legitimate digital marketing agency. We now need to consider how the team will approach selling the brand to audiences and acquiring new customers to reach our monetary goals.

For starters, your business plan should clearly define the strategies you intend to use to approach both new leads and established clients.

While it's true that each customer will have unique qualities, laying out a defined approach or pitch will provide a higher success rate and help employees stick to the company vision.

Because not all new leads typically buy right out of the gate, you'll also want to lay out your strategy for nurturing prospects.

Remember, you're not writing out a guarantee nor is your suggested process set in stone. Nevertheless, you'll need a proof of concept regarding how you intend to obtain new clients if you want to sell your digital agency to others.

Something that can help you define your sales approach is conducting a detailed competitor analysis.

Scout out other digital agencies that will be your direct competitors and determine what strategies they use to attract and secure new clients. Find ways to incorporate tried-and-true techniques into your plan, but do so in a way that adheres to your vision.

Clearly Define Your 1-, 2-, and 3-Year Sales Goals

With your sales strategy defined, you'll now want to create a predictive sales forecast for your digital agency. Every new business is unique, so you'll want to work together with your partners to create realistically achievable sales goals for years 1-3.

It's expected and virtually a guarantee that profits will be low during startup. That's why it's important to project sales growth over time with supporting data.

When outlining your business plan, you should be able to estimate target sales revenue goals as well as a profit margin that slowly increases with time. You must be able to prove to yourself and investors that your brand will be able to operate, market, and sell services in a way that spawns steady, predictable business growth.

Step 5 - Your Marketing Plan

Another major business expense will be your digital agency marketing efforts. Every business has an expected cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and you'll want to define yours now.

You’ll get a better idea of how much it costs to market your brand once you decide which channels you aim to utilize. Because you’re in the digital marketing business, you should be aware of your available options:

• Paid ads
• Paid search
• Organic search (SEO)
• Social media
• Content marketing
• Email

However, you may want to consider additional forms of advertising including print advertising. You may also wish to create your Affiliate marketing program, providing incentives to existing clients in exchange for marketing assistance.

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The marketing section of your business plan should not only include a cost-benefit analysis but should fully detail anticipated strategies for each channel. Not only will this serve as your proof of concept, but will serve as the instructional guidelines your employees need to execute and achieve your marketing goals.

Step 6 - Financial Analysis and Summary

Throughout our entire digital agency business plan, we've set out to define our business, our services, our customers, our sales strategy, and our marketing approach.

With all of this accumulated data, we can create a full-fledged financial analysis of:

• Cost to startup
• Cost to operate
• Payroll
• Equipment
• Programs/Services
• Office expenses
• Taxes
• Cost to acquire new customers
• Cost to retain existing customers

All of this data can help us determine the digital agency’s expected yearly gross revenue, and, therefore, the expected gross and net profit. As briefly mentioned before, you’ll want to set numerous short-term and long-term goals for each category.

Consider setting goals for expected customer acquisitions and revenue for each quarter and each year. This will help to guide business behavior and alert you to potential problems with your business plan if you fail to achieve said goals. Failure to reach expectations can either be an indication of internal issues or that your set goals are unrealistic with the existing market.

Either way, you'll be able to make smart, data-driven changes as long as you have goals that allow you to respond quickly.

Your Business Plan Can and Will Change!

The final thing you should take away from this digital agency business plan template is that none of your writing should be fixed. A rigid, inflexible mindset is almost guaranteed to spell a quick doom for your new startup.

Your desired audience may not be your best choice. Your service package may require changes to net more revenue. Your overall business goals may change as you acquire more experience with new partners, employees, and clients. Even uncontrollable global or economic factors can suddenly shift the way you do business forever.

What makes a successful business is not nailing it on the first try. Rather, it's the ability to intelligently plan for the future, anticipate problems, and remain proactive to changing landscapes as opposed to being reactive. Regardless of what happens, your company should always fall back to its core values and remember that its objective is to serve others and help them solve their issues.

If your website isn't generating a steady stream of new leads, it's not doing its job effectively.

While it's true that web pages can serve primarily to educate, it's a waste to not use that great content to convert users into paying customers. However, optimizing your site for lead generation is going to require synergy in your marketing strategies to get the best possible results.

Below, we'll teach you how to set up a lead generation site that delivers results. Here are our top ten recommended strategies that show how to build a lead generation website the right way.

1. Optimize Your UX (Desktop and Mobile)

Our list starts with a focus on the user experience. We can debate over which website elements are most important, but users will not have the patience to deal with a slow, clunky, and/or ugly website. They can always find a competitor website with better UX in a matter of seconds.

But, what exactly is the user experience?

The user experience refers to any aspects of the website that serve to make the user's visit and attempts to interact more enjoyable. Factors that contribute to the UX include page design, content quality, content presentation, loading speeds, ease of navigation, and interactivity.

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Take loading speed for example. It's a fairly well-known fact that longer loading times drastically increase bounce rate. According to Pingdom, the average load time you should aim for is roughly two seconds. As the time increases from two to five seconds, your bounce rate can increase by nearly 40%.

Other factors can and will cause users to leave. If a user has difficulty discerning how to get sections of the site, if the text is illegible due to design choices, or if videos and images fail to load, you undermine all of the hard work that went into building your site.

The user has zero obligation to stick around, and you certainly won't generate a lead if your website's UX isn't worth experiencing. A bad UX will likely make any of these upcoming strategies irrelevant in your lead gen efforts.

2. Learn the Best SEO Practices

Like your UX, optimizing your new lead generation website with best SEO practices is the best way to build a strong foundation.

SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, refers to any actions taken on the website's front or back end to boost discoverability in search engine results pages. Incorporating SEO in your marketing strategy is essential for ensuring that new users visit your website regularly outside of clicks from paid ad campaigns.

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Before we think about how we can encourage new visitors to become leads, we need to get people in the door. While search ads with Google or social media ads on Facebook can land you website clicks, investing in SEO will help you build organic visits with time, ultimately lowering your total advertising costs.

Having quality website SEO also helps Google match your website content to more qualified users. While traffic gains are admirable, they can often account for little more than vanity. When a website's SEO is just so-so, you can often get clicks from users that ultimately are not a good match when your goal is lead generation.

The more optimized your SEO, the better Google's search crawler can understand the purpose of your page's content. When Google can do its job well, you get the benefit of receiving visits from the type of users you want to focus on converting.

SEO can be a complex topic and covers a wide breadth of areas. You'll want to learn improved keyword targeting strategies, how to check keyword rankings, image and video optimization, script compression, meta tags, and content marketing, for starters. All of these will help your website run faster and rank higher for a variety of search terms.

3. Add a Strong CTA to Your Home Page

This is where direct lead generation optimizations begin.

If you want a user to convert, you need to provide an incentive for them to do so. We often refer to these as "call-to-actions," or "CTAs." These are direct calls to the reader that motivate them to perform a specific action that you've designated as a goal.

When it comes to lead generation, this commonly applies to filling out a form. The user will provide their name and contact details, thus becoming a new lead in your marketing campaign efforts.

However, no one is going to fill out a form simply because you asked nicely. While no money is being exchanged yet, this is still a business transaction. As such, you need to provide a relevant, worthwhile incentive to the user in exchange for their lead information. It doesn't need to be an expensive or outrageous offer, but something small can be enough to win them over.

Examples of strong CTAs might include free consultations, free quotes, a first-timer's discount, or even a complimentary eBook. You want to tailor that incentive to be directly relevant to why the user arrived at your home page in the first place.

As an example, let's consider a roofing company. They can offer prospective customers a free inspection and report in exchange for basic details like a phone number and email. Chances are, someone arriving at your site is already looking for something like this, and providing that CTA immediately creates a high chance for a conversion.

A CTA like this has power as it offers something of value to the customer for free. They also have the motivation to sign up even if they're not quite at the buying stage of the buyer's journey.

Craft a strong CTA that you want to live on your home page and make sure it's one of the first things in the visitor's viewport when they arrive.

4. Add Forms to Other High-Traffic Website Areas

High-traffic website pages are also prime real estate for CTAs and forms.

Many website owners make the mistake of simply adding a 'Contact Us' page to their site and calling it a day. However, you're going to virtually zero direct clicks to that page. That means that a visitor has to go through an additional step and fill out a form to contact you.

Instead, you should consider which pages users are clicking to make their entry into your domain. Specific types of pages, such as a service description page, serve as a better location to implement additional forms.

Consider a user that is specifically searching for a home plumbing service. They click on a company's residential service page to inquire more about the service and prices. This is arguably an even better opportunity to claim a lead conversion than on your home page.

This is because you already know where the visitor's interest lies. With this information, you can curate a highly-specific CTA with your form to encourage even more lead conversions. You don't necessarily need the user to stay on the website longer or click on additional pages.

Use your website's Google Analytics to identify where new visitors are coming from and which web pages they are accessing. Then, make sure to tighten the copy on that page to encourage users to sign up for free estimates, consultations, etc. based upon the topic of the page.

5. Create and Optimize Landing Pages

This strategy piggy-backs off of the previous tip and effectively serves as the bread and butter of any lead-generation website.

While your base website pages can benefit from submission forms, there are limitations to what you can do. Those core pages can help to drive conversions, but their primary purpose is generally to educate visitors about the business and the services offered on an everyday basis.

Making too many changes to these pages and dressing the copy up with flagrant advertising will ultimately hurt your SEO and page rankings.

Instead, we can use the proven strategy of creating and optimizing landing pages with a highly-specific offer in mind. This new page exists for the sole purpose of lead generation and allows you to gain all of the benefits without the potential drawbacks.

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You can sweeten the offer on your landing pages by offering something of immediate value to the visitor. These can include discounts, eBook downloads, exclusive content, or promotional vouchers.

Finally, you can utilize Google Analytics and/or your CMS of choice to A/B test various versions of your landing page. This will guide you to make the necessary adjustments for the best lead-gen results.

6. Don't Overlook the “Thank You” Page

The companion to the landing page is the “Thank You” page. This is where you redirect users after completing their form signup to confirm their submission.

However, most companies tend to leave this page barebones.

What you should be doing is using this page as an opportunity to drive additional engagement. Many users will not even see your “thank you” page, but the ones who do have expressed interest that you should capitalize on with additional CTAs.

For starters, you should make every effort to provide the user with their signup incentive immediately. Instead of entering, “We’ll send your free eBook soon,” you should simply provide a button or link for immediate download. The longer you can keep the user engaged, the more they're thinking about your brand.

Similar upgrades to your second page could include:

• Links to schedule appointments/calls on your Google Calendar/Calendly
• Link to your main website or a relevant product/service page
• Links to follow your company on social media
• Links/downloads to any additional resources relevant to the offer

7. Develop a Blog for Your Website

Blogging is a staple of SEO and is essential for lead generation website best practices.

When creating content for a page, you target specific keywords that demonstrate a strong search volume from your target audience. Because your page is SEO-optimized for that keyword, there's a strong chance that it will rank high in SERPs, providing a gateway for users to access your site.

Blogs exist, in part, for this purpose.

Every new blog article you publish creates a brand-new page on your website. This page targets new keywords, and, therefore, creates new methods for visitors to discover your website.

A well-developed blog continues to provide results over time. When your articles are well-researched, trustworthy, and receive notable traffic, the authority of your entire domain improves. This makes Google more likely to rank your pages, which means more opportunities to convert new leads.

Blogs particularly help lead-generation strategies as the content is highly-targeted. While your base website covers a wider subject (your industry), blog articles bring in users searching for that specific topic. There's a greater likelihood that new visitors clicking on your blog are highly interested, which presents a greater opportunity for conversion.

The blog itself creates an incentive to convert. Visitors that like your content can sign up to receive notifications when new content is published. Therefore, you've already boosted your number of leads just by helping your website's SEO.

You can further boost your blogging efforts by suggesting products or services whenever relevant within the context of the topic. Just be sure to stay true to the purpose of the article and avoid being intrusive with self-advertisement.

8. Nurture with an Email Marketing List

We briefly touched on email lists above as blogs can be one incentive for users to sign up.

However, there are various things you can do with your email marketing lists such as sending out exclusive offers, discounts, or alternative content that can't be found on your website. All of these provide visitors with an ongoing incentive to subscribe as opposed to a one-time offer.

Furthermore, the email marketing list works for you beyond the initial lead conversion. Equally important is nurturing those leads for the long-term so that you gain more value per acquired lead.

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A commonly repeated idea in business is that it costs as much as five times more to acquire new customers than it is to retain existing ones. This means that to build a truly exceptional lead-generation website, you need to implement strategies that nurture your leads after they sign up to maximize your potential profits and keep expenses low.

9. Put the Call Out for Follows on Social Media

Social media often gets overlooked as it typically does not provide the initial, endorphin-pumping ROIs that a paid ad campaign would, for example.

There are two problems with this.

The first is a misunderstanding of what your company's social media accounts should be used for when it comes to digital marketing. Similar to blogs, your objective is to regularly send out engaging, relevant content to your followers.

Unfortunately, most brands put in the bare minimum effort and deliver cold, lifeless posts that do not motivate them to engage.

The second issue is that it does not acknowledge the visitor's mindset, which is crucial for acquiring new leads.

The truth is that many would-be interested leads simply don't care about the content brands post on their website. These users spend most of their online time on social media. If that demographic happens to align with your target buyer persona, then you must meet your audience where they spend their time.

Regarding your lead-generation website, you can help your social media by simply providing CTAs to follow your brand on other accounts. Make it easy for visitors to consume the type of content they want to see rather than limiting your offerings to what's on the page.

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Staying active on social media can help you quickly reach new audiences and provide unique platforms for you to share your offers and content. You can also link back to content on your website to increase your traffic and further drive your lead conversions.

10. Build a Chatbot

Finally, you can help drive engagement on your website by creating a customized chatbot. These automated helpers can speak to users about the content they are reading and help them find solutions faster. This massively improves your UX, which is key to lead generation.

Chatbots can provide users with a sense of self-dependence. While you're actively helping them find information, they feel like they are in control of making educated decisions as a consumer. When a visitor feels good about their experience, they're much more agreeable to signing up, subscribing, or even making a purchase.

You can easily build your very own chatbot by using platforms such as ManyChat or Chatbot. Not only can it improve your lead-gen website, but it can also help cut down on the number of support requests your customer service team receives.

Set Up Your Lead Generation Website the Right Way

Every business needs to make a profit, but it all starts with a steady stream of qualified leads. While some strategies might bring quicker results than others, it takes synergy among multiple digital marketing channels to get the best possible results.

Ensure that your website is worth visiting. Make sure that it runs well, provides attractive offers, and educates the visitor with high-quality content that establishes you as an industry authority.

Take advantage of the free tools available to you such as Google Analytics to test your content and develop landing pages that convert.

Finally, provide alternative options for visitors to engage with your brand such as chatbots, social media feeds, and email marketing lists. The more personalized your messages, the more likely you are to improve your conversion rate.

When we discuss marketing strategies, sales performance, and other business strategies, there's always one underlying motivation - profit margin.

It doesn't matter how stellar your performance is, if the business is not making money, there is no business. Though we typically discuss techniques that ultimately contribute to increasing your profits, sometimes you need to focus on the basics.

Today, you're going to learn how to increase profit margins for your small business quickly. These basic changes should increase your cash flow and allow you to do more with your brand down the line.

How to Increase Profit Margins in Small Business?

Pandemic has taught us many things, including the value you drive from minimalism. So, apart from the crucial metrics like sales performance, it's time to discuss a few intelligent strategies that will cut wasteful practices and increase your profit margins with a high degree of certainty.

Strategy 1 - Get Rid of Unnecessary Operating Expenses

If there's been one benefit for businesses over the last two years during the global crisis, it's an increased focus on the essentials. More companies are eliminating unnecessary overhead by getting rid of the fancy offices, excess equipment, and superfluous expenses.

However, getting rid of the office isn’t necessarily a strategy that every business can utilize. Nevertheless, every business typically ends up with unnecessary spending through one of the following ways:

• Overstaffing for certain roles or tasks within the business
• Paying for unnecessary services / paying for higher subscription plan tiers than necessary
• Extending business hours beyond what’s worthwhile
• Poor efficiency in shipping and receiving
• Poor strategies & time management

As you can see, your business can quickly rack up its cost of daily operation in numerous ways. If you’re serious about increasing your profit margin, then it’s time to get very critical when it comes to the company’s strategies.

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Implement a plan to observe the daily tasks performed by employees. If you have any persons on your team that are not essential, then you have the tough task of relieving that employee of their duties. In some cases, it can be more affordable to assign more tasks to an essential employee with the promise of increased compensation and a title change. However, only do this if it does not harm overall productivity and company efficiency.

If your business is open for 12 hours a day, but typically only sees worthwhile business during 10 of those, consider cutting your hours to avoid paying operating costs beyond what's necessary. Alternatively, you can close the business to the public for the remaining time and allow employees to focus on internal tasks if it helps you to better achieve your goals.

Finally, you must maximize your efficiency when it comes to your shipping department. The longer it takes you to ship an order out of your warehouse after a purchase, the more you're spending on overhead costs. Keep your business agile, improve your workflow, and trim the fat wherever possible. Effective e-commerce order management can streamline your operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and directly contribute to your profit margins.

Strategy 2 - Better Forecast Customer Demand

This strategy bleeds into what we discussed above in regards to shipping and receiving. If your company consistently finds itself with more product on hand than what's being ordered, you need to revise your forecasting strategy.

Not only are you paying for more product than you are selling, but you are also paying overhead costs to store that excess product until it's ordered. If you work in a business that deals with fresh goods and expiration dates, you're losing money to product you'll never be able to sell in time.

This can be a tricky issue to solve as you also don't want to be a brand that's continuously out of stock of in-demand products. A way to solve this is to provide customers with alternative ways to order products such as direct home delivery with free shipping. Customers then have a way of spending their cash with your brand and securing the product, walking away satisfied.

Ultimately, this all comes down to continuously refining your production process. You want to minimize the time between production and sale to be as minimal of a period as possible. It's also okay to keep some surplus inventory on hand for emergencies but avoid overspending as much as possible.

Strategy 3 - Cut Low-Margin Products or Services

Continuing on the topic of inventory management, we also recommend that company's cut any low-margin products or services from their offerings entirely.

It's a natural thing for companies to want to offer their customers a large and competitive selection of offerings. However, if you're not getting a worthwhile ROI when producing and supplying certain goods, then it's ultimately not worth the expense.

You will be better suited to utilize that effort and spending to further market and produce your best-selling goods or services. For small businesses, you will often find better success in specializing in a few offerings as opposed to being average in many things. You might lose a small number of customers in the process, but the math shows that the expense reduction is worth more than the minimal number of sales gained otherwise.

Strategy 4 - Cross-Selling and Upselling

Cross-selling and upselling are staples for increasing profit margins for good reason.

Cross-selling is the practice of selling additional products or services that have a direct relation to the product or service the customer is already purchasing. For example, if a customer is already in the process of buying a computer, you could attempt to cross-sell keyboards, mice, monitors, mousepads, and much more.

Upselling, on the other hand, is the practice of convincing a customer to purchase a more expensive, premium version of a product or service they're already set on buying.

While both focus on different aspects of sales, both strategies are meant to capitalize on individuals that have already tipped over to become buyers in the sales process. Consider two different customers at polar opposite ends of the buying process:

Customer A is simply learning about computers and prices available from various brands. He/she is likely looking for the best product and the best value.Your brand still needs to market to them and convince them to make a single purchase from you. If you suddenly ask them to pay more without initially persuading them, you're simply likely to make them turn away.

‍Customer B has already chosen your brand and added their brand-new PC to their cart. They already have their credit card in hand and are clicking through the checkout process.If you were to show them a slightly upgraded version of the PC or suggest some affordable, add-on products, they'd be more inclined to buy. To someone spending $100, spending $10 more often seems insignificant.

This is all a part of segmenting your target audience and marketing to them appropriately. Not only is upselling or cross-selling to the wrong person a fruitless effort, but you'll also end up spending more of your marketing budget than is worthwhile. However, if you target the right customers with additional offers, there's a great chance you can sell more with minimal effort.

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Strategy 5 - Increase Your Prices

This is the strategy that typically scares company owners away, but it can often be a necessity.

Let's face it. When a business raises the price of its products or services, it's an inevitability that it will lose some customers that get priced out. It's even scarier if your closest competitors continue to sell at lower prices despite rising overhead costs for everyone.

However, a pricing change can also spell success if you do your research.

First, if you already have a strong customer base, a slight price hike is going to be unlikely to scare them away. Any price increase is disappointing, but communicating your reasoning for the change effectively can help quell any strife. Your hard work in nurturing and taking care of your best clients will be rewarded here.

“Some price optimizations were successful and others weren’t. But the ones that we communicated well were always value-driven.” – Yamini Rangan, Chief Executive Officer, HubSpot

If this isn't enough, consider any low-cost additions or upgrades you can add to your products or services to sweeten the value without adding much of an additional expense. If customers can correlate a price rise to more/better products or services, they'll generally be more agreeable to pay.

Finally, you can pivot your brand marketing to focus on highlighting the quality of your offerings. No matter your industry, there are always brands that can maintain a loyal following with the understanding that they are paying a premium price to engage with your brand.

Of course, price increases should ultimately be avoided if your research shows that the effect of the potential client loss outweighs the potential profit margin increase. Exercise caution with this strategy, but know that many brands continue to implement it to great effect.

What is a Healthy Profit Margin for My Business?

If you were to try and get a general answer for any business, you're likely to hear around 10%. However, this is not exactly helpful as typical profit margins vary greatly depending on your industry.

Thankfully, the NYU Stern School of Business provides us with the latest average profit margins in the United States as of January 2022 here. As you can see, gross margins can fluctuate by the tens, placing a much greater focus on the success of businesses in the same field as yours.

The general rule is that a sub-10% profit margin is low, with 10 being the average, and above 20 is exceptionally high. More importantly, the sign of a successful business is to see a steady increase in your profit margins each year that you stay in operation.

Conclusion - Boosting Profit Margins is a Constant Analytical Effort

All of the above strategies are regularly utilized by businesses every year to increase their earnings. Some of these tips are great rules to operate by for any business including cutting unnecessary expenses, accurately forecasting demands, and upselling customers when possible.

Further improvements to your margin will take closer analysis and testing to ensure the best results. While cutting unnecessary staff can help in the short term, you might also hurt performance or productivity if you find your company too short-staffed.

Finally, increasing company prices can bring in more revenue, but do so with caution. Create a careful strategy to support your price hikes as to not alienate the customers that allow you to stay in business. With the right data to back up your decisions and the right strategy to support them, you can add small percentages to your profit margins in several areas over time.

Building a marketing plan is essential if you want your brand to survive in the digital landscape.

The shocking reality is that many brands are unaware of what a marketing plan is or looks like. What results is much-wasted effort and budget throwing tactics at the wall to see what sticks.

Your marketing strategy doesn't need to look like this. Every business goal is far more attainable than you think as long as you have the right marketing strategy outline that works for your team.

Let's dive into what a true marketing plan is and what you can do to start creating a marketing plan template today.

What is a Digital Marketing Plan?

A digital marketing plan is a blueprint of your business objectives and how you intend to use digital marketing channels to achieve them.

A well-formatted plan should include a realistic timeline for near and future business goals. It might also include mini-objectives you can use along the way to chart your progress and navigate potential pitfalls.

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With a marketing plan template in place, all members of your team should have a clear vision of how best to use their marketing channel and specialty to help the brand reach its destination. It should also reveal ways for various mediums to synergize for a greater impact on your ideal customer.

Building a Marketing Plan

With this definition in mind, you may have a better overall idea, but still need some instructions as to where to begin.

Thankfully, creating a marketing plan is not so daunting as long as you follow a basic, proven template that's helped countless businesses achieve marketing success online. First, we'll start with the basics and then expand on key ideas as we learn more about the process.

Step 1 - Conduct a SWOT Analysis of Your Current Business Status

First, let's define a SWOT analysis.

SWOT stands for Strengths,ā  Weaknesses,ā  Opportunity,ā  and Threat.ā  It's a popular planning strategy that helps individuals choose how to best attack a personal or business project. You may also hear this referred to as situational analysis.

The reason for the popularity is that this template allows you to immediately identify four key factors that most heavily impact any plan and its potential outcome. Let's look at how this applies to a business marketing plan.

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A. Strengths

What is your company's greatest strength? This can highlight your best products and services, your best marketing channels, access to greater ad budgets, and so on. Any company asset or utility that can give you a leg up in achieving your goals can be classified as a strength.

B. Weaknesses

Conversely, which areas leave your company most vulnerable? You need to be completely honest and assert which offerings are not competitive and which areas of your current team require improvement.

Turning these weaknesses into strengths can be a long-term goal, but are ultimately things you want to keep at the forefront of your mind so that you can plan for potential problems.

Both your company strengths and weaknesses are a direct result of factors you can actively control within the team.

C. Opportunities

On the other hand, your opportunities and threats are the direct result of factors outside of your immediate control. This includes the potential customer base and the direct competition that poses a threat to your overall success.

Opportunities can come in many forms. Is there a particular demographic that expresses interest in problem solutions that your brand can solve? That demographic is now an opportunity.

It can also include economical changes, events, or even physical proximity to a customer base with high potential. Consider everything happening at the community level, nationally, or even internationally that might set your brand up for unique opportunities that otherwise would not be as prevalent.

D. Threats

Finally, your threats would be the same forces of opportunity but are actively working against your success. Perhaps the employment crisis as a result of COVID-19 leaves your target consumer with less money to spend on your product. This is an easily-identifiable threat to your brand.

Brainstorm every community and environmental factor that's relevant and classify them as either an opportunity or a threat. This will come in handy when building your actual plan.

Finally, and perhaps the most important part of threat analysis is to closely examine direct competitors. You'll want to remain acutely aware of their offerings as well as the strategies being implemented in their digital marketing plan. You'll want to be less reactionary and more proactive in creating your digital marketing strategy that can capitalize on the competitors' weaknesses.

With all of this initial data accumulated, we can then proceed to the next steps in creating a digital marketing plan.

Step 2 - Define the Ideal Customer Persona - Then Segment Your Audience

The upside to performing a company situation analysis first is that it can help you get a leg up with this next step.

Every brand has its ideal customer persona. This is the fictitious profile of an individual that naturally stands to benefit the most from your offerings. Your products or services help the individual solve a problem, and your pricing conveniently meets their income level and buying habits.

Essentially, you want to consider your lineup of offerings and think about the group(s) that would genuinely benefit from them. If you run a landscaping business, it wouldn't make much sense to make a marketing plan that sells to apartment renters. Instead, you might want to target the associations that own those buildings. You could also target homeowners if you observe a need for your services in local neighborhoods and income levels that support that need.

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Beyond realizing your ICP, you'll then also want to start segmenting your audience. Realistically, your team will be able to come up with several different groups that stand to potentially benefit from your brand. You'll need real marketing data to determine the strongest buyer group, but that will come later.

Segmenting your audience is essential for marketing success as online marketing channels become overly saturated. When users are flooded with ads daily, they're more likely to click away from anything that's not highly personalized.

When you segment your target audiences by age, gender, income levels, living status, or personal interests, you're better poised to market-specific sections of your offerings to the groups. This will result in running multiple campaigns and ad groups simultaneously, but the clicks you receive will be from more qualified customers.

Step 3 - Create Immediate and Long-Term Objectives

We now have our results from our SWOT analysis and understand the type of customer we want to emphasize in our marketing plan. Now is the time to start visualizing and creating an objective roadmap.

While long-term goals such as achieving X profit by the end of the fiscal year is great, creating several smaller objectives will help you better chart your progress. If you aren't hitting your smaller objectives, you'll be more agile in identifying problems and coming up with new solutions. Setbacks are inevitable for every business and planning for them is what sets a successful business apart from a failing one.

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It's ultimately up to you to define the goals you want to achieve as they are contingent upon your business plan. However, all of your goals should be realistically achievable, measurable, and have firm dates for completion. You may want to boost brand recognition on social media channels, increase your email listing subscribers, or achieve a certain ROI progressively over the entire year.

Defining your goals is crucial in creating a marketing plan as all great digital marketing occurs as the result of experimenting, measuring, and optimizing. If you don't have the means to achieve a goal or a way to measure performance, you have no feedback loop to help you guide future business efforts.

Step 4 - Position Your Products and Services to Sell

This one's a bit trickier to get into place as your business will naturally have limitations regarding what it can offer the customer. However, it doesn't matter how much of a demand there is for a product if your selection costs more than the average customer can spend.

Getting your pricing right, however, is only one piece of the puzzle. Consumers will be critical of product/service selection, as well as the quality or build of those offerings. You need to find the best middle-ground of satisfying customer demands without overextending your budget or capabilities.

This will all tie back into identifying your ideal customer as well as the direct competition. Your brand will be best positioned to sell more if it offers one or more of the following:

• Better pricing
• Better quality
• Better customer service
• A better selection of goods
• A selection of goods that differs from competitors

Not only will product positioning help you connect more with existing audiences, but it can also help you branch out and market to new groups that were initially less qualified. A strong foundation for your brand will help you to achieve both short and long-term goals when it comes to new customer acquisition.

Step 5 - Create an Action Plan for Each Marketing Channel

So far in our digital marketing plan, we have:

• Identified the company’s strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities
• Discovered our ideal customer(s)
• Established the business goals we want to achieve through digital marketing
• Established an attractive product and service lineup

The final step is to utilize this well-earned data and use it to guide our digital marketing campaigns. The marketing channels you choose to use will be contingent upon your resources and budget.

For new brands looking to make immediate customer acquisitions through spending, you will want to consider utilizing PPC campaigns on popular platforms such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads. The CPC offered through these channels is relatively low and will also allow you to collect a wealth of data from your audience segments.

For long-term growth and brand awareness, you'll want to start bolstering your website's SEO and content. Blogs are an exceptional way to boost your search rankings and make for great content to share on your social media accounts.

While brands would benefit from leveraging every digital marketing channel, it's important to create a realistic plan for the ones you intend to use. Study up on each channel and consider how you can use them to help you achieve your short and long-term goals. Set up micro-conversions and custom goals to help you track your progress along the way.

Bonus Step - Continuously Monitor and Optimize Your Campaigns!

With your digital marketing plan in place, know that your job is far from over. Digital marketing is an ever-evolving game and you shouldn't be surprised when best practices change not long after you've created a new plan.

Thankfully, most digital marketing platforms feature convenient smart automation tools that allow for better optimization and tracking. However, your team will still need to monitor this data and use it accordingly to help you achieve sales and growth. Anticipate changes and trends ahead of time and pivot your creatives as you go or else you'll fall behind.

This new data creates a feedback loop that will bring you back to earlier steps in the digital marketing planning process. If you're struggling to achieve goals, use your new data and circle back to your ideal customer or goal objectives. Modify your strategy and work your way forward once more.

With meticulous attention to detail and continued effort, you'll have a living marketing plan that will help you achieve your business goals.

Creating a sales culture is a challenging task for every business.

We’re not talking about simply landing big clients and closing profitable deals. Those are the rewards you can obtain after you do the hard work of building a sales organization that will succeed.

Sales culture ideas refer to things such as team synergy, creativity, and promoting values that foster a healthy, motivational, and productive sales team.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to build a sales team that inspires current employees to succeed and for newcomers to join with pride. Help your hardworking digital marketing team reach the finish line by supporting them with a dynamic sales team that knows how to deliver results.

What Does a Quality Sales Culture Look Like?

Before we can dive into how to create a better sales culture, we first must define positive sales culture traits. To better understand why those positive traits are essential, we should also examine the traits of a harmful sales environment that are unfortunately all too common.

What qualities do you think of when you are presented with an opportunity at a sales-focused team or company?

If the company is successful and with a team that boasts a strong track record, you can likely expect the following qualities:

• Strong, well-defined sales strategies shared and implemented by the entire team
• Mistakes are encouraged, not shamed
• Team members are given personal freedom to develop their own techniques
• New ideas are shared as part of a collaborative effort
• A team-first mindset
• Strong compensation that includes benefits (bonuses for employees that excel)
• Humility and an eagerness to learn regardless of experience or tenure
• Team competitiveness that is encouraging, not destructive

While these sales culture ideas might seem like a no-brainer for what you want your company to look like, it’s quite often not the reality. Instead, we see many negative sales culture ideas that perpetuate and look more like this:

• A lack of structure, project management, or a cohesive vision for the company or its goals
• Employees rarely try new strategies as mistakes are severely punished by management
• Heavy micromanagement regardless of performance
• Team members withhold new ideas to distance themselves from others for personal gain
• A me-first mindset
• Poor compensation and unreasonable expectations that emphasize survival instead of growth and success
• Superiority complexes and actively discouraging new members from speaking up or participating
• Toxic competitiveness that celebrates an individual at the expense of others in the company

It can seem like an easy task to avoid these common pitfalls of toxic sales culture if you know what to avoid.

However, many of these negative characteristics end up falling into place because of how closely sales culture can toe the line. What can start as a friendly competition to encourage better performance from all can turn destructive quickly. Before you know it, members of the team will dread coming to work until they inevitably quit and leave you shorthanded.

While it’s the responsibility of all to create the healthy work environment they want to see, much of these ideas start and end with quality management.

If you find that your sales team is constantly battling a high turnover rate, burn-out of employees, and overall poor performance, it's time to self-reflect and look at some proven strategies you can implement to reinvigorate and build a high performance, healthy sales team.

How to Build a Healthy Sales Culture?

While sales-oriented companies face the high stress of deadlines and reaching critical goals, none of it is possible without your team. With that in mind, a healthy sales culture starts by building a strong foundation that allows each individual to succeed on their own and as a part of a unit.

As a manager or company owner, it's your responsibility to not just coordinate the sales team, but to understand and motivate your employees to reach their full potential. To achieve this, start by tackling the following issues and allow the results to speak for themselves.

1. What is the Goal for the Individual/Team/Company?

Of course, the company's goal is to increase its profits. However, what does that mean to the individual sales rep and the entire team?

Sit down with the leaders and decision-makers at your company and consider what goals you need to establish for your sales team. This is good practice for any work environment, not just sales. Humans tend to work more efficiently when they have a clear understanding of what's expected of them as well as a goal to aspire to achieve.

Having clearly-defined goals can also immediately quell any potential for issues between team members. If the overall goal is for the entire team to reach a monthly sales quota, it naturally creates motivation for each person to carry their own weight. If someone is underperforming or struggling, it benefits them to connect with their teammates and understand what works and what does not.

It also sets up a more natural opportunity for you to identify areas for improvement among individual sales reps. This allows management to approach team members to discuss potential issues without leaving them feeling blindsided.

2. Identify the Cause for Employee Turnover

In sales-oriented environments, unexpected resignations or firings can place undue stress on the team and the company in a hurry. Unfortunately, a problem like high turnover rates is not always easy to identify. However, you can take steps to control things on the company side that encourage employees to stay on board and perform to their full potential.

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First, consider the current level of compensation your company offers. Speak with your team members and interview former employees regarding their reason for leaving. If compensation is an issue that is repeatedly brought to attention, you can guarantee that it will be a motivation-killer.

Again, your company cannot achieve success without a strong team. Take care of your sales representatives so that they take care of you.

Of course, not all companies can offer the best compensation in the industry. This is why it's also essential that you communicate expectations for duties and compensation when recruiting and hiring for the role. Never mislead employees about expected pay and do not bait-and-switch new hires by demanding more responsibility than what was agreed upon.

Finally, reassess your interview and hiring process overall. Your role expectations and compensation may be fair and competitive, but you still can end up hiring the wrong person for the role. Though it will take longer to be thorough and interview more candidates, it will pay off in the long run when you do not have to repeat the process.

Using tools like Personio can assist in managing employee data and tracking turnover rates. Additionally, exploring alternatives to Personio can provide options that might better suit your company's specific needs and budget.

One employee's resignation can be reflective of the person. Multiple resignations that lead to a high turnover rate are almost certainly a sign of problems on the company side that you must address immediately.

3. Foster Communication and Collaboration

While micromanaging your employees is a bad idea, that's not an excuse for you to be absent and avoid communication. As the team leader, you can help to facilitate the type of sales culture you want to see by being an active part of it.

Common strategies for promoting better communication and teamwork are to schedule regular meetings between you and your sales team. These can be short, daily get-togethers or weekly sitdowns that offer a brief reprieve to destress and discuss the week's activities.

These types of meetings are opportunities for you to encourage the type of democratic environment you want from your sales representatives. They also present opportunities for learning and development that everyone can benefit from equally.

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If your employees see you elevating team members because of their successes and helping struggling employees to do better, they will follow your lead.

Be sure to stress that while personal performance is desired and admirable, overall team success is what allows the company and everyone involved to reach new heights.

4. Establish Trust and Respect

Something that often goes overlooked is establishing implicit trust between yourself and the sales rep. Even if the expected duties are reasonable and the compensation is fair, employees will notice a lack of trust or respect and grow to resent you for it.

It's one thing to check in on a struggling team member, but repeatedly hassling someone with a great track record is a great way to make them check out mentally. Establishing and maintaining that level of trust and respect falls to you.

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As mentioned previously, avoid micromanaging any of your employees. While your company should have defined goals and establish helpful strategies, remember that you hire new employees for their talents, knowledge, and experience. If the sales rep is hitting their marks and keeping customers happy, trust them to get their work done like a professional. If they have an issue, they will let you know.

That leads to the second aspect of building trust. If an employee comes to you with feedback, even if it's tough to swallow, always be willing to listen. Even as an experienced manager, you are not without faults and can just as easily make mistakes. While every company has a hierarchy, you're ultimately two individuals working together to achieve the same goal.

Listen to your team members, respect their voices, and approach serious discussions with a level of preparation. As long as you remain fair, reasonable, and respectful, your employees will notice and provide you with the same treatment in return.

5. Allow Fun in Your Sales Culture

Finally, encourage your sales team to not only work hard but take time to enjoy themselves. We all spend a significant portion of our lives in the workplace, often spending more hours with coworkers than we do with families. No matter how great the work environment is, this can take a toll on even the best worker if they're dreading every day to be all work, no play.

Think of ways to keep the workplace interesting and exciting. Surprise employees with unexpected breaks to hang out and chat. Use the occasional company funds to provide food or drink for employees just to break up the usual routine. Even minor changeups to the day can help your sales reps break out of that monotonous loop and get reinvigorated for the rest of the day.

Not all the fun needs to happen in the office, either. If your company can afford it, pay your team to take half a day and head out somewhere fun for casual team-building and rapport. These gestures remind us that we're all people striving for the same goals. Most companies will not make the effort to do this, so you can be assured that your employees will thank you for it.

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Don't Just Build a Sales Team - Build a Sales Culture Worth Joining!

In summary, start forming your new sales culture by developing the workplace you'd want to be a part of as a promising sales rep. Employees are rightfully expecting more out of employers, which means much more than just compensation. However, none of these expectations are unreasonable and will lead to a healthier work environment not just for them, but for everyone involved.

If you want a healthy, positive, competitive sales culture, use these strategies to create that exact environment for them to thrive. When your employees are satisfied, they will be loyal to you and work hard to achieve their goals. Never forget that employees are what makes a company succeed and you likely won't go wrong in creating the ideal sales culture.