10 Marketing Strategies To Increase Sales & Win [2024]

Want to increase your sales in [2024]?

The most straightforward way to do that is to drive more traffic to your sales funnel. 

The logic behind it is simple: more traffic -> more leads -> more sales. That makes sense, right?

Today we are going to share ten marketing strategies that you can use to generate traffic…

#1 – Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is arguably the most accessible form of marketing because all you need in order to get started is a social media account. 

There’s no “best” social media platform because it all depends on who your target audience is. 

In general, though:

• Twitter is probably the best choice for writers who sell newsletter subscriptions and books.
• Instagram is probably the best choice for businesses in health and fitness, beauty, and lifestyle niches.
• LinkedIn is probably the best choice for businesses that sell B2B products and services (consulting, B2B software, etc.).

Meanwhile, Facebook can be a great place to promote all kinds of local businesses, from house cleaning companies to combat sports gyms to restaurants. 

Facebook can also be a good way to reach specific demographics that prefer this platform. Say, if your target audience is new mothers, then you can easily find a ton of mom groups there.

You also want to consider which platform best suits your strengths. Say, if you are a personal trainer, Instagram may seem like the obvious place to promote your business. But maybe you are good at writing, in which case Twitter might make more sense. 

Once you choose a social media platform, building a following boils down to these three things:

1. Being consistent – Lack of consistency is the number one reason why entrepreneurs fail on social media. It’s easy to get excited and post 3x per day for a week, it’s hard to keep posting 3x per day for a year without fail. The vast majority of people either give up too soon because they don’t get immediate results or they simply get distracted by something else and abandon their social media profile. If you can commit to a content schedule and stick to it no matter what, you will get ahead of the competition simply through consistency.
2. Providing value – Another reason why entrepreneurs fail on social media is not providing enough value to their followers. People will follow you if you share interesting content and helpful resources, teach them something useful, or entertain them. It’s best if you can do all three. They will NOT follow you if all you do is promote your products and services because endless sales pitches don’t provide value.
   
   Social media scheduling tools like MeetEdgar can help you get organized, produce content in batches, and schedule it in advance. This not only makes it easier to remain consistent but also allows you to put guardrails around your social media usage. We all know how distracting it can be!

3. Encouraging engagement – You also want to set aside time each day to interact with your followers. Ideally, you should respond to every comment that you get. This will drive engagement which is presumed to be the most important factor that determines which profiles are favored by the social media algorithms.

In short, if you consistently provide value to your dream customers while keeping engagement high, you will eventually amass a social media following. That’s pretty much all there is to it!

#2 – Newsletter Marketing

Newsletter marketing is another form of marketing where the entry barrier is extremely low. All you need to get started is email marketing software. 

Substack is the most popular choice because it was specifically designed for people who want to start a newsletter. It allows you to build an email list, have both free and premium newsletter tiers, and publish your newsletter issues as blog articles that you can then promote on social media to attract new subscribers.

ConvertKit is another great option. It was designed for creators who want to build an audience in the form of an email list. It has a broader functionality than Substack and includes some e-commerce features.

We recommend starting a free weekly link roundup newsletter where you share links to articles, podcasts, and videos that your dream customers might find interesting.

Once you get the hang of it, you can begin expanding the scope of your newsletter by adding original content such as articles, interviews, and case studies. 

Having a newsletter like that is great because it allows you to build an audience, provide free value on a weekly basis, and promote your products and services. Moreover, your newsletter is a traffic-generating asset that you own!

You can grow your newsletter by building a following on Twitter, adding a link to your newsletter in your bio, and then driving traffic from Twitter to your newsletter. 

If you want to learn more about growing a newsletter, you might want to check out this case study:

#3 – Free App Marketing

Free app marketing is an interesting marketing tactic where you create a free app for the purpose of promoting a paid product (typically, a paid app).

Marc Louvion, a rising star in the indie hacker scene who came to prominence by reaching $50k+/month revenue with ShipFast, used a free logo maker called LogoFast to promote it.

He advises taking a standalone feature of your paid app and making a free version of it that you can then use to promote the paid app.

Here are his guidelines for best results:

• The app must be free, that’s how you create a viral loop.
• One feature is enough. It must be super simple.
• The name should tell exactly what the app does. That’s how people remember and search on Google.
• The experience must start on the homepage. Visitors shouldn’t sign up or click links.
• The app can be hosted on your main website but it’s best to give it a dedicated domain.

#4 – YouTube Marketing

YouTube can be a great way to reach your dream customers. 

However, if you want to build an audience on this platform, simply posting videos won’t be enough. You need to be strategic about it. But what does that mean?

1. Make sure that your YouTube channel looks professional. This includes your channel banner, your profile picture, and your thumbnails.
2. Target a specific keyword with each video. You can find popular keywords by looking at search suggestions: type in a general search term related to your industry and see what suggestions come up. Once you have chosen a target keyword, do competitor research. Watch the top 3-5 videos that are currently ranking for it. Then make sure that your video is better than all of them!
3. Encourage engagement. Come up with a question designed to start a discussion, post it as a comment, and pin it at the top of the comment section. Reply to each comment that you get.

People tend to overestimate the importance of production value which can lead to feeling overwhelmed. But the truth is that production value doesn’t matter that much as long as the content itself is valuable.

For example:

Tina Huang is a popular data science YouTuber who has over 600k subscribers. Here’s a video that she published back in 2020:

As you can see, it’s just her talking to the camera with some random Amazon boxes behind her. Hardly a Hollywood production. But guess what? 

If you look at the comments section, it’s full of people thanking her because this video helped them to decide between software engineering and data science. It’s the content that matters!

So don’t worry about the production value too much. Sure, you want to improve it over time, but your primary focus should be providing value. 

There’s some disagreement among marketers about how often you should release new videos. Some believe that publishing frequency matters a lot while others say that it doesn’t matter that much and that you don’t need to post on schedule to build a following on YouTube.

It’s likely that both approaches can work but if you want to err on the side of caution, then it’s best to have a regular publishing schedule. It might help you get on the good side of YouTube’s algorithm!

#5 – TikTok Marketing

TikTok is a pretty crazy platform. 

It’s much less predictable than YouTube due to its algorithm that is optimized for catering to the viewers’ interests directly instead of doing it indirectly by relying on their social graphs. That’s what makes TikTok so addictive!

If you are already making videos for YouTube, it makes sense to repurpose that content into shorts and post them on TikTok as well. You never know, you might go viral!

#6 – Podcast Marketing

Is it still possible to build a successful podcast?

On the one hand, there’s no denying that the podcast market is oversaturated so it’s going to be an uphill battle.

On the other hand, the reality is that just like with pretty much everything, most people fail because they give up too soon.

In fact, there’s a statistic going around that claims that 90% of podcasts never release more than 3 episodes and that if you release 21 episodes you’ll be in the top 1% of podcasts in terms of the number of episodes published.

It’s unclear where these numbers come from so it may be a meme statistic that isn’t based on any data. Still, even if it isn’t entirely accurate, it’s probably not too far from the truth given that the Internet is littered with abandoned projects, including abandoned podcasts.

It’s probably safe to say that if you start a podcast and commit to releasing a new episode every week for at least a year, you’ll probably start seeing some traction by the time you publish your 52nd episode!

#7 – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Building a niche blog can be a great way to get organic search traffic. 

High-quality SEO content that targets a specific keyword remains the foundation of search engine optimization.

There are tons of free keyword research tools out there but we recommend investing in a premium one. Ahrefs is the most popular choice among digital marketers. 

Here’s the official Ahrefs keyword research tutorial that will teach you the basics of keyword research in just 33 minutes:

Once you have chosen a target keyword, you need to do competitive research and figure out how to make your content better than everything that is currently ranking on the first page of Google for that keyword.

Typically, you can improve on existing content by making your content more:

• Comprehensive. It should cover everything that the reader needs to know about that subject in order to get the result that they want.
• Unique. Share your own experience whenever possible, preferably with data and screenshots to back up your claims.
• Readable. Proper formatting with subheadlines, numbered lists, and bullet points can do wonders for readability. You can also use images to break up the text.

We recommend using a tool like Clearscope or Surfer to optimize your content for SEO. These apps are pricey but they are also effective. 

You will also need to build backlinks to your content if you want to stand a chance at ranking on the first page of Google.

This link-building guide from Ahrefs can help you get your first 100 backlinks:

Ahrefs also has a free advanced link building course that you can find on their YouTube channel. 

Link building is extremely important because it’s pretty much impossible to rank on the first page of Google if you don’t have any backlinks. Merely creating high-quality SEO content isn’t enough anymore!

People tend to avoid link building because it requires cold outreach which inevitably means facing endless rejection. It’s tempting to retreat into the safety of content creation but that’s a fatal mistake if you want to build a niche blog. You need to go out there and get those backlinks!

#8 – Affiliate Marketing

When you are just starting out, you don’t have an audience of your own, so it makes sense to tap into other people’s audiences. This is what affiliate marketing is all about.

First, you need to set up an affiliate program so that you can create affiliate links, track affiliate performance, and manage payments.

Once that’s done, it’s time to start looking for affiliates. The easiest way to find them is to reach out to people who already have an audience and pitch them an affiliate partnership. If you have a good product and offer a 50% commission, joining your affiliate program should be a no-brainer.

Also, if you are selling subscriptions, consider offering a recurring commission if at all possible. This can work really well for SaaS companies. 

For example, when the email marketing company Convertkit hit $20k in MRR, they launched a generous affiliate program that offered a 30% recurring commission. This worked great because their target audience was bloggers who had audiences of their own, were familiar with affiliate marketing, and saw this as an excellent opportunity to create a new stream of income. 

You can also take affiliate marketing to the next level with a webinar funnel. Reach out to people who already have an audience and pitch them an affiliate partnership where they promote your free webinar to their email list, you host the event and sell your product at the end of it, and then you split the proceeds.

This is what our co-founder Russel Brunson did to promote ClickFunnels when we were just starting out and didn’t have an audience of our own!

#9 – Influencer Marketing

While the term “influencer” is associated with Instagram celebrities, it can mean anyone with a substantial social media following: Twitter posters, YouTubers, TikTokers, etc. 

Influencer marketing tends to be somewhat hit-and-miss because you never know if your offer will resonate with your audience. 

That being said, if you are willing to invest time, energy, and money to find influencers who are a good match for your business, it can work really well.

We recommend targeting nano-influencers (1k to 10k followers) and micro-influencers (10k to 100k followers) because they tend to have the most engaged audiences while also being the most affordable.

Reach out to them and agree on a deal where they give you three shoutouts over the course of three months at a frequency of one shoutout per month.

At the end of that three-month period, you can look at the data and decide whether it makes sense to continue working with them.

Note that influencer marketing is not the same thing as affiliate marketing because you are paying them a fixed fee per shoutout as opposed to a commission from each sale. 

Still, if you are working with several influencers at the same time, you need to give them unique links that they can use to promote your offer. Otherwise, it will be impossible to tell how much traffic each influencer is sending your way!

#10 – Paid Advertising

We would argue that paid advertising is the best way to generate traffic because it’s:

1. Targeted. Social media platforms have sophisticated ad targeting capabilities that allow you to really zero in on your dream customers.
2. Immediate. Running ads is the fastest way to get market feedback. This is extremely valuable because it can save you from wasting months or even years on a product that no one wants.
3. Scalable. Scaling ad campaigns is pretty straightforward!

Paid advertising is one of the most valuable skills that you can have as an entrepreneur because once you master it, it’s like a superpower that you can then use to sell anything. 

Warning, though: you need to be prepared to lose money on ads until you learn how to run them profitably. Think of it as your tuition fee!

Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment!

In theory, you can make any marketing channel work with discipline, consistency, and a long time horizon. 

In practice, though, there’s this inexplicable unpredictability to marketing that you need to take into consideration. 

Some people languish on YouTube and then blow up on TikTok. There are creators who have less than 3k subscribers on the former and 143k followers on the latter despite posting similar content on both. Why is that? No one knows. Probably something to do with the algorithms.

And it’s not just YouTube vs. TikTok, this applies to all marketing channels. You never know what will work. You might start on Instagram and then eventually find success on Twitter. 

That’s why it might make sense to experiment with several platforms, see where you are getting the most traction, and then double down on it!

Get “Traffic Secrets” For FREE!

Our co-founder Russel Brunson has written a best-selling book called “Traffic Secrets” in which he shares marketing strategies that he used to grow our company to $100M+ in annual revenue. 

It’s available on Amazon but you can get it from us for FREE. All we ask is that you cover the shipping!

Get “Traffic Secrets” For FREE!