But tapping into new customer audiences is just one of the many ways an outdoor brand can increase its revenues and boost its bottom line. If your outdoor brand is looking to leverage current market conditions to generate company growth, consider these six revenue-boosting tactics that can grow your market presence and deliver increased sales:
1. Establish clear goals
As with any brand initiative, it’s important to start out with a clear definition of what success looks like, along with a road map for getting there. Then, once the current initiative’s target growth goals are hit, your brand can re-evaluate and set new goals. Such detailed and up-to-date planning is critical because a business’s goals are always evolving, and the market is always changing — requiring regular strategic adjustments to keep the business moving forward.
For example, a start-up’s initial goal may be to achieve profitability. Once that challenge is met, a subsequent goal may be to generate enough revenues to fund strategic growth and build cash reserves for upcoming investments. Whatever stage your brand is currently in, make sure your next goal is well-defined and top of mind, and that you have a well-thought-out plan for achieving it.
2. Add complementary offerings
Especially for consumers in the outdoor industry, pursuing a hobby or passion can require not only a base initial investment, but also ancillary investments for related gear and other needs. For example, to get started with kayaking, a consumer will not only need to invest in a kayak, but also in a paddle, a life jacket, a helmet, means for hauling he kayak and equipment to and from the launch and pickup points, storage equipment, etc.
When a trusted outdoor brand produces the kayak, for example, and gains a reputation for providing a quality product to its consumers, it’s in a strong position to leverage and build upon that reputation with complementary offerings such as the paddle, life jacket, helmet and more. Once your outdoor brand reaches a point where production and distribution of your primary offering(s) is dialed in, look into whether producing and selling complementary offerings would make sense for your consumers and your brand.
3. Revisit your pricing strategy
Price is, of course, one of the top factors consumers consider before making their purchases. And while a low price can drive more sales, too low a price can create a negative perception of a brand’s value — and too high a price can scare potential customers off. Further, as market conditions constantly change, the cost of producing and distributing an outdoor product can rise and fall.
All of these factors can combine to make developing a pricing strategy a persistent challenge — and to provide good reason to revisit your pricing regularly. When doing so, keep a close eye on the competition and what it’s charging for its products and services, then adjust your pricing accordingly to establish your desired position in the marketplace. If the demand for your brand’s offering is high enough to warrant it, a gradual price increase is a great way to boost company revenues over time.
4. Maximize marketing effectiveness
Marketing is an obvious way to boost a brand’s revenues, and it is much more effective when employed strategically and optimized over time. To make your outdoor brand’s marketing efforts more effective, work to develop a strategy that serves your marketing communications to the specific segment of consumers who are most likely to convert — and from there, let data drive your ad’s optimization.
Among the advertising avenues available to today’s outdoor brands, many — and especially the digital offerings such as social media advertising, PPC advertising, email marketing and video pre-roll ads — allow for high levels of audience targeting and segmentation based on consumer characteristics such as age, interests, geographic location, past buying habits and more. Consider employing some of these ad types, and use their segmentation options to choose what you believe is the perfect audience for your brand messaging. Then — employing a key step to ad optimization — experiment with your choices and analyze your ad analytics to, over time, dial in the audience segment that best responds to your ads and delivers the highest ROI for your ad spend.
5. Focus on repeat business
As the well-known marketing-industry maxim says, it costs five times as much to attract a new customer as it does to keep an existing one. And by leveraging existing customer relationships, outdoor brands can cut their marketing costs via a reduced need to invest in certain segments of the marketing funnel with these consumers — at least from a brand-recognition and -preference standpoint, as they’ve already got a built-in head start on the awareness and consideration stages.
To effectively tap into this opportunity, outdoor brands should ensure that their marketing strategy includes regular communications with past customers. A few proven tactics for maintaining an active conversation with these consumers include developing a strong content strategy/owned media strategy that sparks consumer interest and educates consumers on best practices when using its products and services, boosting social media efforts, offering discounts and coupons for existing customers, and instituting a brand loyalty program.
6. Elevate the customer experience
One of the biggest keys to the customer retention and brand loyalty alluded to above is ensuring a positive customer experience — from the first time a consumer becomes aware of your outdoor brand on through the purchase experience, the subsequent use of the products and services themselves, and any customer-service activity that may follow. And a customer experience audit can go a long way toward making sure that your brand is hitting all the right notes throughout the customer journey. Consider employing such an audit to develop valuable insights on things like your customers’ buying behavior (and what percentage are repeat buyers), what it’s like to buy from you, your customers’ impression of your brand and the perceived value it provides — then take the audit results to heart and work toward making any needed improvements.
Could your outdoor brand use the help of a group of experienced marketing professionals to boost its revenues? At TBA Outdoors, we’re here to help you grow your revenue streams with tried-and-true, data-driven tactics and strategies. Further, our fully integrated marketing firm boasts a team of seasoned specialists (and outdoors fanatics) who can cover all aspects of marketing — including SEO, brand strategy, creative, social media, e-commerce, analytics, public relations and much more — all in one place. And as certified brand strategists, we can also help you with the big-picture adjustments sometimes needed put your outdoor brand on a course to long-term success.
To get started with professional guidance ranging from a simple website analysis to a comprehensive strategy tailored to boost your outdoor brand’s overall performance and identity, contact us today.
