The biggest perk of digital marketing is that you’re able to track and optimize all your conversions. This means that the line between marketing and sales becomes thinner and thinner.

To increase your sales, you have to plan every step from the very beginning. A well-converting sales funnel is your way to go. You should pay extra attention to every stage of sales. The stages are as follows:

• Converting prospects to leads
• Converting leads to customers

A prospect

A prospect is a person potentially interested in your product. It’s the user who enters a relevant query on Google or the one who just visits your website.

A lead

A lead is a person who’s already interested in your product specifically. Someone who’s subscribed to your newsletter, has downloaded a presentation of yours leaving their contact information or has subscribed to get a free product from you.

A customer

You have to convert a lead into a customer to provide them with real value and benefit from their spending.

This is basically how a sales funnel works: you find a prospect, convert them into a lead, and then convert your lead into a customer. Seems easy, right?

Now you have to start the process and see how it works. What’s going well? What can be fixed? Make sure to make their path as short as it gets. Fewer steps, more customers. And don’t be afraid of tests. Only with testing, you can find both your strongest and your weakest points and optimize them all.

With more complex and mixed digital marketing tactics and strategies, the traditional understanding of social media marketing seems to be changing drastically. But does it mean that SMM as we know it is dying? If you’re only interested in the direct answer, here it is: no, SMM is not dead and won’t be for a long time.

The thing is, social media trends have changed drastically over the last few years. What was working in 2016 is no more applicable to your new strategy.

The number of social networks and channels is constantly growing, and “quality over quantity” is becoming more real than it has ever been. What platforms are you going to use now? Only a few companies can afford using dozens of them actively. And passive use is sometimes worse than anything. So what are your platforms of choice?

Pay attention that your users hanging out on a specific platform don’t make it a good fit for your business. If you can’t use a channel to provide people with valuable content, be careful: it can be just silly to push paid ads and hope for the best.

You may have 10 times more potential users on TikTok rather than Quora, but Quora can still work better for you if you give users evergreen content that also ranks super high on Google due to the Q&A snippets gaining priority.

So think wisely and choose the platforms carefully. Remember that content quality matters just as much as the distribution channel and keep the balance.

The term Conversion in marketing refers to the process of converting a prospect into a customer. How easy do you think it is? Well, it’s pretty easy if you know how to do it.

There’s never a universal solution to converting people easily. To make it work, you must know your people well and know your product very well, too. Conversion goes hand-in-hand with the UX all over your online presence.

First of all, you should make every step as easy for the user as it can be. If the user’s ready to pay you and they spend more than 5 seconds looking for the payment button on your website or app, you’ve most likely lost them already.

Growing a profitable niche market

As mentioned above, you should know your product and your user well. How will a customer benefit from your product? How’s it better than what competitors offer? You need an honest answer to this question.

Ask your existing customers. What was it that made them convert from a prospect to a lead and from a lead to a customer? In this answer, lays your key to success.

You’re going to get hundreds of different answers. Choose the main selling points that have convinced the existing customers, and highlight them. Do A/B tests every week to see what messaging works best of all. Keep optimizing, and you’ll discover your perfect converion funnel.

The biggest social media marketing trend is back: online communities are on top again.

Social media marketing was going in the wrong direction for a couple of years. I mean, the annoying ads all over the platforms and messengers. Who clicks on them? Clearly, unless the ad is perfectly targeted, it’s just a waste of money and tons of other resources. And trust me, perfectly targeted ads don’t come along every day.

Today, if you want to build a strong online presence, build a community.

First of all, communities provide you with user-generated content, so half the job is done for you.

And secondly, the content looks more genuine, more real, and more user-centric.

Look at your Facebook timeline: remember how often you used to see posts from pages you follow and how much more frequent group posts have become instead? Well, that’s because of Facebook’s “new” community-centric policy that Zuckerberg’s team has been optimizing for the last couple of years. It also provides a horizontal distribution of information which is (or at least looks) more democratic than ever.

And check out the “spaces” on Quora. The platform has been user-centric forever, but now they pay more attention to the communities.

Even the learning app Duolingo is #1 in the world due to the communities if forms. The meetups, the contests and leagues; it’s all a part of the community-building approach that keeps the company running and users adding.

Keep it all in mind when planning your next campaign: maybe instead of PPC, you’ll spend a bit more on quality content that can help build a community and add value in the long term.