How to Influence Customer Demand to Improve Your Cash Flow

Savvy marketers understand one thing: increasing gross profit generally goes straight to the bottom line.

Increasing sales of your highest-profit products and services is the fastest way to achieve that goal. Hence, you must increase demand for those very items. In order for this to happen at the highest level, you need to influence demand in a practical way, which is what great marketing’s all about.

How to Do It

The process by which you achieve that objective is predicated on practicing certain time-tested principles. When approached properly, price becomes less and less important. Most notable among those principles is the creation of influential marketing, which makes customers come running to you to purchase specific products or services that will satisfy their needs. Influential marketing creates immediate and measurable sales without a lot of discounting. It also builds your brand.

What does it look like? An editorial providing compelling reasons for customers to make a purchase, supplemented by evidence. Just as editorial writers influence opinions, so must you.

The second concept is the need for repetitive marketing. When your message is basic and sound, it warrants repetition, which influences more and more customers, especially when you approach the sixth, seventh, and eighth time you’re repeating a very strong message. However, if your message wasn’t meaningful to the customer the first time, repeating it is just a waste of money.

The third basic principle relates to how to use media to your advantage. Until the Internet boom, the newspaper was the staple of advertisement. Today, online marketing is more important than ever. It’s vital for a business to build a website that not only announces where you are and what you sell, but also helps you create sales in the same manner as offline marketing. Putting it to use to create sales of not only products, but also your most vital services has become paramount.

Your website can become extremely influential when it has good, efficient content showcasing your knowledgeable about chronic diseases. This is a subject in which pharmacists haven’t been adequately trained, but becoming the resident authority on chronic diseases puts money in the bank.

Facebook has also proven to be a powerful online marketing tool. Facebook leaders have determined they want to capture a bigger share of the marketing messages delivered, so they have made it possible to present larger ads without the limitation of a certain number of ciphers. Using Facebook to present powerful, well-designed marketing messages will help you gain traction in the marketplace rapidly.

This is all predicated on the fact that you still need to have a certain amount of presence offline. Testing newspapers and magazines that reach your target audience is still incredibly important. If you get the desired results using the same type of advertising you use on Facebook, then you will have the proper supplementation to your online marketing. If not, keep testing alternatives like weekly penny savers, monthly consumer packs, or equivalent magazines. They may surprise you by delivering more traffic and sales volume through your doors. These days, you must use a multiplicity of media.

Influencing demand isn’t easy. It requires the application of know-how and creativity and more expert marketing than your newspaper or online provider can give you. Messages to your potential consumers should be of the highest quality so they produce the results you want. The payoff is when you see more customers coming through the doors or calling you, which can translate to profit.

Are you ready to influence demand? You may not be a master at it, but try it.

The Pharmacy Sage can be reached at (518) 346-7021 or Lester@ThePharmacySage.com