The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Successful sales is a difficult multi-level process that requires a lot of effort, knowledge, and attention. Sometimes methods and approaches that showed good results in the past don’t work anymore.

In this case, there's a need to search for something new and reliable, something that will rescue the situation. That’s why it's important to follow sales trends and consider using new features before competitors. It always helps to be one step ahead and earn the reputation of the leader.

In this article, we'll take a close look at 5 new and already popular eye-catching trends in sales.

Sales Trend 1. Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is a new way of communication with clients and leads that appeared thanks to the customer’s need to talk to brands. People who consider buying your product don’t want to just read about it on your website or fill in the form to complete the order. They often have questions and want to get the details that allow them to make the right decision and purchase (or not) the goods or service your offer.

In other words, conversational marketing helps to create a direct dialogue between the company and potential or current customers. Thanks to modern tools like messengers or chats, it’s possible to start such a conversation any minute and get all the answers here and now.

Conversational marketing is mostly built on another technology that has already made a lot of things in our life easier and faster — artificial intelligence or AI. With the help of robots nowadays companies have everything for constant sales growth — they're able to collect information about customers’ behavior and use it for sales forecasting or personalization. AI is involved in price calculations, allows us to systematize almost everything, and wisely use this data.

According to official statistics, the amount of companies using AI and machine learning (ML) in marketing increases every year. In total, around 50% of companies already use AI for marketing activities or are going to do so in the near future. That’s impressive, isn’t it?

Using AI in marketing allows you to:

• Automate various processes and save time
• Avoid errors
• Save money
• Grow ROI (return on investment)
• Implement or develop personalization
• Make important decisions faster and easier

AI helps to show better results in marketing and use resources in the right way. This is visible in statistics and financial results. In the 2018-2019 financial years 10 companies increased their revenue by more than 10% thanks to using AI in marketing. Around 70% of companies performed better by up to 10%:

There are more examples that provide incentive to start acting. An American company named Albert uses AI for making successful ad campaigns for their clients on Google, Facebook, Youtube, and other platforms. As a result, one of Albert’s customers — a well-known motorcycle brand, showed incredible results the previous year and grew its website views by 566%.

Another inspirational case — Google. Thanks to ML technologies, Google helps its customers to place ads more effectively and spend less. One of its customers — brand GittiGidiyor — tried Google Smart Shopping for managing their ads and actually won a sales increase of 4%.

Chatbots

Another advantage of using AI is chatbots. The popularity of this technology is growing day by day but still not all companies know how to benefit from it. Let’s figure it out together.

The main idea and goal of sales chatbots are to show the customer that the company takes care of them and is ready to help in case of any questions, doubts, etc. Chatbots are useful for you as a company or a brand if you:

• Work on personalization and want your customers to feel unique.
  
  
• Experience a big percentage of leaves on the website and have to solve this issue.
  
  
• Need to communicate with prospects that have already expressed but haven’t made a decision.
  
  
• Have to ease the pressure on customer support and use automation for answering frequently asked questions.
  
  
• Are going to implement multiple languages functionality.
  
  
• Think of collecting customer’s feedback and analyzing it, etc.

There are actually only a few reasons why you should use chatbots for your business. The main reason is the widespread use of this communication solution will increase in the future. Some researchers say that by 2022 almost all healthcare and banking queries will be handled by chatbots. Nowadays there are more than 300K active chatbots on Facebook, and it’s only the beginning.

Sales Trend 2: Voice Search

People are always in a hurry and try to save every single moment of time. This is also reflected in the way the audience searches for information on the Internet — typing is not so popular anymore. Most people now use voice search. This is the reason why voice assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant are so widespread, especially among young customers between 29 and 49 years old.

Taking this into account, companies should optimize their websites for voice search, keeping in mind that voice search greatly differs from word search. When users look for some information with the help of voice search, they mostly use so-called “сonversational tone” and often formulate their requests as if they are speaking to a friend and thus, they use long-tail search queries. 

This means that you need to use long-tail keywords on your website, as they are able to answer different voice-search requests. Such keywords may be narrowly focused, or more general and have commercial or informative intent. The easiest way to find such search queries is by using a keyword generator tool. This way, you will be able to find long-tail variations for your focus keyword and check their parameters like search volume or competition. Moreover, you can see who ranks in the top 10 for such keywords.

Voice search-friendly content on your website increases your position in the mobile search list and ensures audience growth. Figures state that around 22% of all voice search is dedicated to location-based content. Local businesses interested in developing within their region ought to pay attention to voice search opportunities.

One more clear benefit of voice recognition for marketing is a chance to build a brand name based on unique and useful content. If your company has enough resources, you may try to create an “Alexa Skill” or “Google Action” and share tips about your product or service that will answer your customer’s day-to-day questions. For example, one fabric-producer company in the USA gave its clients advice about taking care of different fabric types in such a creative manner. The only big disadvantage of this way is its relative complexity and high cost.

Orienting on the voice search may also be a good chance to improve SEO optimization and customer experience. If customers get direct and clear answers to their questions from your website it will attract their attention to the product or service even more.

One more outstanding example of Voice search implementation was created by Salesforce. The company introduced a service that makes meetings easier. Einstein Voice transcribes all the information and saves it directly in Salesforce CRM. This helps to save the team's time and resources for more important tasks.

Sales Trend 3: Video Content

Have you already heard the viral prediction that in a few years most of the content on the web will be video? It actually seems to be true. Just take a brief look at these exciting statistics:

Amount of users who watch video content in the USA (2013-2021)

How many companies use video as a marketing tool (2016-2021)

Step by step videos have become a powerful tool that helps to communicate between customers and companies better. Brands prefer video content because it increases conversion and open rates. The audience chooses video content because it’s the fastest way to get the needed information.

There are different types of videos that are used in marketing. Here we listed the most common ones:

Sales Trend 4: Omnichannel Marketing

One more marketing sales trend you should use is called omnichannel marketing. It means supporting the client and communicating with them on different platforms and levels.

If you switch to the omnichannel approach in your strategy, you will use all the possible and available tools to keep in touch with your target audience. It’s not good enough to be connected with leads and clients only through the website. Use messengers, chats, apps, be creative and offer new tools that will attract your clients.

Omnichannel marketing is well-known within big corporations, but it should also be applied by middle and small businesses. Furthermore, using different messengers doesn’t cost a fortune.

One of the great and most innovative cases of omnichannel marketing is dedicated to Disney Park. It has created a lot of planners and helpers that assist the guest at all times, from the moment he or she has booked a trip. The company communicates with the clients on different stages and provides them with all the needed services using different software, platforms, and tools.

Another brilliant idea of implementing omnichannel marketing was used by the British online store Oasis. The company’s team decided to focus on Ipad and iPhone users and offer them a special set of functions that makes ordering clothes easier. Customers may pay with the help of their gadget, get some delivery discounts, or even ask the managers in the store to order items for them.

Sales Trend 5: Social Selling

Social media is a reliable sales trend nowadays that will likely keep its important position in the future. If you want to stay tuned and communicate with your clients efficiently, don’t forget to be active on your accounts.

Statistics say that 3.78 billion people in the world use social media for private purposes. These people spend around 2,5 hours a day looking through new posts/stories or messaging on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media. You may use this potential for attracting attention to your particular brand.

Social selling is also useful for “catching” leads that may be really interested in your product and are able to buy it. For example, Mercedes Benz earned around 87M organic Instagram impressions and 2M likes and increased its sales through informing the target audience about new cars by means of different social media activities aimed at involving younger customers.

Conclusion

Sales trends and following them are quite important if you want to grow the business and increase the revenue. You are free to choose all the techniques and methods you like. It’s best to take all of these trends and implement them in your business marketing strategy. Start with conversational marketing, use it together with the omnichannel approach, add some videos and enjoy your increased revenue.