IELTS Essay: Company Sales Strategies

In this essay, you will have to talk about sales methods companies use to improve their sales. If you haven't studied the subject of marketing or economics, you might be a little unsure about the whole topic. The good news is that nowadays, we are surrounded by these methods, as they are a part of our daily life. These are for example:

• Advertisements we see on every street, bus stop, billboard, or shopping mall wall
• Company sponsorships like music festivals or sports events
• Hollywood movies having real-life products shown in them
• Social media ads we see every second while scrolling

Now let's take a look at some of these examples you can write about:

Companies tend to use famous actors, singers, athletes, and more as their face, presenting the products they are selling, and paying them generously. Famous athletes for instance represent Nike or Addidas. The shoe giants pay every single athlete on the planet to wear their brand of clothes or shoes and that increases the company's revenue, as many young and middle-aged people follow those celebrities on social media and see them wear those every day (and copy or imitate their style by buying the same shoes or clothes they wear).

Influencers are sort of like celebrities but were not so famous in the first place. They usually appear on the newest types of social media like Instagram, YouTube,  TikTok, and more, and create self-made creative content. After they gather a following, big brands get in touch and ask them to represent their brands by wearing, showing, or pushing their audience into buying some of those goods. There are many luxury brands that use this strategy all the time, as millions of young people are on those social media, consuming millions of hours of content every day.

Normal discounts have become a well-known thing at the end of a season for clothes, but these days with the explosion of online shopping, many discount holidays have appeared, where many if not all products online receive huge discounts and sell out in minutes. The most famous discount holidays are Black Friday,  Cyber Monday, or Christmas in the West, and 11/11 (Singles Day) in China. These holidays make people have a fear of missing out and make huge revenue for their companies and retailers.

One of the easiest ways for a company to build well-selling products is to focus on their quality. When companies produce a product that is truly worth it, people begin to share the information one to another, and this word-of-mouth recommendation creates an avalanche of sales in the long term. Everyone knows of the top quality cars like Mercedes Benz and BMW, or the top electronics producers like Samsung and Apple. In their case, they don't even need to advertise, as people would instantly go and buy their newest products, without any second thought.

A way for companies to expand their brand reach is with sponsorships. This means that large companies spend money on events around the world to create a sense of "goodwill" with the audience. For example, the beer manufacturers Heiniken or Budwiser invest heavily in music festivals or sports events. A person can see their logos and brand on every big international event and even in big Hollywood movies, and this way people might try their products, like them, and in the end begin buying them.

Although all of the above can be called advertising, advertising, in general, has been one of the best ways to increase sales and show a large number of people the newest, hottest products and services from companies. Just looking at McDonald's and KFC, we can see millions of ads on traditional social media like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, and further on video-sharing platforms, or billboards and shopping malls in the cities. If a company wants to sell a new product, an advertising campaign "everywhere" usually works the best.

The question asks "What is the best?". In this case, it doesn't really matter, as none of the strategies are truly "the best". In fact, only a combination of all of those can really make a company an outstanding seller of products or services. Further than that, every person can resonate differently with those strategies. Some might like celebrities and hate influencers. Some might watch only Tik Tok but never visit Facebook and so on. For this reason, you can simply pick one that you believe is the best in your opinion. (For example top quality.)

Marketing strategies for companies constantly evolve, especially after the invention of the internet. In our time, people are constantly surrounded by advertisements, be it on their mobile devices, their TV, on the billboards and walls of buildings, or even on themselves in the form of branded clothes, shoes, and caps voluntarily. This essay will examine a few of these methods used by corporations to maximize their sales output.

At first, inspecting these marketing strategies shows a constellation of methods, ever-growing, and ever-shifting. For instance, there is one of the newest ways for presenting products and services – using video social media influencers. People with a following are being tapped by companies to represent their brand and sell in real-time on Tok-Tok, Amazon, or YouTube. This method attracts the younger generation, as they are constantly consuming content on those social platforms. Further, a strategy that is increasingly effective is called “product placement”. This simple method of placing a popular brand – say a can of Coca-Cola, or a Mercedes Benz car in a hot upcoming movie, TV series, or even video game, can cause a sense of envy or desire for that particular item from the audience. The better the scene, the more impactful this indirect ad becomes for the viewer. These are two very powerful means of increasing sales on a global scale.

In terms of effectiveness, there isn’t a one size fits all approach. In other words, marketers and advertisers use an ever-increasing number of strategies and methods in order to boost sales. Simply partnering with one superstar might give them an increase in their sales, however, that could be temporary, or only affect one target demographic. Marketers know that in order to achieve constant and consistent growth, they need to experiment (and occasionally fail) with many strategies. They could partner with an actor to represent their brand, but also, they would invest in sponsorships for well-known events, join in on massive discount holidays like Black Friday and Christmas, use traditional TV and Facebook or Google ad campaigns, and much, much more. As stated above, no single method outshines another, as they have to work together back-to-back to achieve the ideal target growth.

Overall, to achieve big sales, companies rely on multiple complex strategies for growth. These could come costly, and a start-up would definitely have to select the more cost-effective ones at first. Unfortunately, this reason alone facilitates big multinational monopolies to thrive and is somewhat punishing individual entrepreneurs to achieve success. Hopefully, this advertising system can become easier for start-ups to succeed in in the future so we can achieve better global prosperity.

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