market products and services at scale
If you have a product or service that is selling well and you want to scale your sales, consider one of these ten proven and creative ways to grow your business.
Did you know…?
The cover image in this article is inspired by an anecdote where it is said that prostitutes in ancient Greece used sandals that left the imprint of “follow me” as a way to promote their services.
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1. Membership
2. Prosumer
3. White Label
4. Continuity
5. Online marketplaces
6. e-store funnel
7. Sale by Catalog or Infomercial
8. Star bonus
9. Sale by chat or phone
10. Trojan Sale
The most important thing is that…
1. Membership
Affiliate marketing is an old sea dog ideal for businesses with products that sell very well.
Amazon owes part of its success to affiliates, as for virtually its entire existence it has allowed affiliates to refer products for a 10% commission.
This led to tons of marketers starting niche websites to put articles of interest and recommendations to Amazon products.
Today you see this with content creators, like gamers on Twitch, sharing the settings they have on their computers and even the chair they use, putting affiliate links to each component within the Amazon store.
2. Prosumer
Nowadays there is a lot of talk about influencer marketing.
Instagram and YouTube are two quintessential media where this type of sales occur.
Basically what you do is sponsor an influencer, paying them more or less for the relevant keyword of your product multiplied by the interactions that you actually think they will have (you know this based on the average interactions that you see on their posts after 24 hours). .
The prosumer is basically the one that an influencer recommends your products that he also uses. It is even more so when they themselves use them, hence the good thing that sponsoring is, because the mention occurs more often.
Some prosumers launch their own brands, but this is really only the most popular. For example, the instagrammer Chiara Ferragni, one of the forerunners of street style in fashion, has her own brand of which she is the face.
A democratic strategy of prosumerism is that your products or services are Instagrammable , that is, they are attractive enough to post a photo or selfie on Instagram. If it isn’t, you can use strategy 8 on this list to compensate.
3. White Label
The white label is essentially about reselling your products, without using your brand, but putting the customer’s.
Many importers do this on various products, making it appear that even the pens in one office are made by the same office.
Any type of product can be sold in this way.
For example, website storage services use reselling as a white-label product where anyone can sell website storage as their own service.
This has the benefit of making your business look bigger than it really is and more professional.
Even writers write books pretending to be others, hence they are known as ghost writers (or ghostwriter in English).
So if you have a good product or service that another business could resell, and branding is not that important to you, this can be a very viable option.
Drop-shipping also works like this. Well, the manufacturer sends its products or performs services that you sell directly to the customer, but pretending to be you, without revealing that it is a third-party service.
White label has many faces.
4. Continuit
Subscribing to various products and services has a huge benefit: it ensures future income.
A gym doesn’t care too much about this because their business model is typical, you pay monthly.
The same a bank when granting a loan.
Likewise your cable TV service.
Newspapers, magazines, executive memberships, sports clubs, and other businesses also found great success with subscriptions.
But why not do it with more recurring consumer products?
For Netflix it makes sense, also to sell razors and other personal hygiene products, clothing (this is how luxury brands sell to captive customers every month through boxes sent home where they can select what they want), household products and even access to an ever-changing catalog of music.
For businesses where subscription doesn’t make sense in the first place, you have to be a little more creative.
Some have created industrial magazines that they sell with membership and in them, there is not only content, there is advertising for the business itself of its products and services, and they also sell advertising to third parties!
Even businesses like Costco make their profit base primarily from memberships, and that allows them to sell their huge selection of products at very low margins.
5. Online marketplaces
Many services have been provided to serve as intermediaries, facilitating transactions between sellers and buyers.
Walmart thus grew a lot, because the store is associated with local suppliers that supply them with a lot of product, and that usually sell very well. Of course, the store has payment policies that will not excite everyone.
Amazon expanded to being the one stop shop through its FBA program where the supplier can ship their products to Amazon’s distribution center and Amazon handles all the logistics for you.
Alibaba has turned your main site into a monster online marketplace
serving big buyers that already has global reach.
AliExpress does the same but on a smaller scale of purchases allowing anyone to buy.
Uber and AirBnb have their products from online marketplaces.
The lesson here is, if you can’t create your own trading platform, then use one that gives you access to a larger market.
6. e-store funnel
Conversion funnels are the friendliest way to do niche ecommerce.
By niche I mean that you sell to a VERY specific market
Click Funnels became very popular by allowing this: you create a conversion funnel, which means that you prepare different pages well with videos, images and a great sales presentation , and you can sell endless things.
It is even more powerful when you can associate a continuity program (another way of calling subscription) and you can climb your client in a pyramid, for example starting by selling a book at the base of the pyramid and taking it to the top to personalized advice. to the top of the pyramid.
7. Sale by Catalog or Infomercial
Catalog sales are a popular sales channel in Mexico, especially in middle-class female markets and households with a mother figure.
Given that most people in Mexico seek a secondary income, and have small networks of influence, offering catalog products is a natural option.
For this option to be viable, it is convenient that you have a good control of the cost of your products, so that you can have a margin and your resellers also have theirs. Especially since catalog products tend to go towards the cheap.
Catalog sales are not limited to this, of course. You can also print catalogs and send them to your potential customers. This is what many companies that sell to industrial markets do.
You can also create infomercials and present them in various media. The best known is television. There are also channels dedicated to sales on television.
But you can also put it in your premises or in non-competing business premises with a good influx of potential customers. They are TV screens that show the infomercial (or several) one after another in a cycle.
This type of business model scales in different ways depending on how you have chosen to create your network.
However, it is important that you have a clear idea of how you can sell in the future using that same network so that it is really scalable.
8. Star bonus
The star bonus refers to when your product could be sold very well, but it does not sell well because it is not attractive, like cleaning a carpet, you can give with the purchase a bonus, an extra product or service (of low cost for you but with high margin) that is more attractive.
You can include raffles or have your local TV star partner take a selfie with your customer.
Or you can team up with some trendy Instagrammer and let your customers receive a personalized greeting message from her.
Perhaps you can get even more out of it by organizing an event around the sale, hosting a potluck, dance, or enticing musical performance.
The point is that you use some element that irrationally attracts the attention of your client, be it something fashionable, be it something aspirational… or using some sin: gluttony, lust, ambition…
9. Sale by chat or phone
You don’t always need to be fancy and sell with a funnel website that automatically renders page after page according to visitor clicks.
You can also do it the classic way and just use a chat or phone presentation to sell.
Having an open customer service and sales line is one sales line, and a chat is another. Friendly service, solution-oriented and knowing how to introduce offers and promote the sale is a wonderful sales mechanism.
For that, you have to develop scripts that serve as a basis so that on your side you always know what to say.
There are programs that allow you to analyze the calls, such as the duration and register if a sale was made in a call, to know who sells well and who does not. They are also recorded so you can analyze them.
Sure, this is for sales floors.
But as long as you don’t have at least one chat or phone line supporting you, you’ll always be leaving money on the table.
10. Trojan Sale
The Trojan sale is an opportunity that not many take advantage of, because it requires seeing opportunities where few usually recognize them.
Surely you have heard that saying that the trash of some is gold for others, or something like that.
Well, not to sound cruel, but many leads that other businesses collect through their own efforts don’t convert for them.
It may even be from an apparently competing business.
They paid to have that prospect, and he or she just ignores them.
That may be an opportunity for you.
What value would it have for your business if someone that prospect already knows speaks well of you and recommends you?
It can be at market price, above or below, however you can negotiate it.
Trojan sales have many faces. In this case, it is worthwhile that the business that you recommend is one with a good reputation in the market and not someone unknown.
It can also happen by building an audience first based on interest, and then introducing a product.
That is, you plan a product launch aligned to the launch or growth of a channel of interest. It can be a Facebook group or a YouTube channel.
Of course, this can be scaled because you can get n businesses that recommend you and you can reuse that channel that you have created to continue growing and promoting other things in the future.
The most important thing is that…
Build marketing assets that you can exploit and grow by finding new uses for them, putting them to best use, and aligning them with other assets so you make an infrastructure .
