Sales Over Likes: How to Effectively Promote Business Online

For running an online business, having the right priorities is crucial. Today, most companies invest in emotional marketing, trying to reach the largest possible audience and establish close connections with them. Because of this, metrics like engagement, social media reactions, and average product ratings take center stage.

Yes, they matter for working with existing audiences and building customer loyalty in highly competitive markets. But they’re meaningless if they don’t translate into actual sales. A successful online business model doesn’t start with creative content or social media activity. Its foundation is a clearly structured system where each element serves its purpose: attract, retain, convert.

The team at iWeb agency explains how to build such a model for online business promotion, what to focus on first, and how to maintain the system’s performance to preserve achieved results.

Why reach doesn’t equal sales?

The current trend is viral advertising campaigns and business presence on social media. Market leaders use quite aggressive communication strategies aimed at massive reach. Statista experts believe that by the end of 2025, total business spending on social media marketing (SMM) will grow to $276.72 billion.

Many startups and growing companies consider this the secret to leaders’ success. They copy such communication strategies and allocate large percentages of their budgets to them. But copying strategies without understanding their essence rarely produces positive results.

The number of likes and views, reach and engagement levels, click-through rates, and behavioral metrics don’t give a real picture of sales effectiveness.

Without a sales funnel, proper analytics, customer interaction logic, and understanding of lead cost — it’s just informational noise. Social media presence makes a company recognizable among the target audience, but doesn’t guarantee that consumers will actually buy its product.

Here are key signs that online business promotion is going wrong:

1. Marketers can’t accurately explain how metrics in reports affect financial results.
2. Decisions are made intuitively rather than based on data.
3. Ad campaigns are built around creatives, not specific goals.

Profitability indicators by communication channels aren’t tracked or calculated at all. The website exists “in a vacuum,” without connection to the sales system and marketing policy. In such situations, promotion goes blindly. Marketing activities are carried out just to be heard. The business doesn’t get real return on investment.

What online business promotion strategy can actually sell?

By themselves, a website, ad campaigns, SMM, and communications have limited effectiveness. For them to actually sell and ensure stable financial flows, they need to be combined into a cohesive system. Each element of the marketing strategy should have a clear role in the sales funnel — spark interest, lead to commercial offers, push toward action, maintain contact, motivate repeat engagement.

A truly effective online business promotion system includes:

1. Connection to global business goals. The marketing strategy should build a clear sequence. For example, capture 10% of the market by 2032, increase sales to $15 million, expand the customer base to 44,000 and increase customer lifetime value, launch advertising to new audiences.
   
2. Integration of key components. Website, marketing, analytics, communications, and databases should have clear meaningful connections. Every potential customer action should leave a trace in the system with channel, time, lead cost, and outcome tracking. For example, if the website generates leads, telephony takes calls, but information isn’t recorded in the database, the chain breaks — the business simply doesn’t know how to work with customers.
   
3. Manageable sales funnels. The customer interaction scheme should map out all touchpoints. For example, cold audiences have a need or problem and get familiar with the brand, warm audiences receive solution examples, hot audiences see clear commercial offers. Managing funnels requires clear key performance indicators (KPIs) at each stage: ad click-through rates in search or advertising, lead cost, conversion levels, etc.
   
4. Effective analytics. The main success signal of a strategy is improving financial indicators in the long term. Analytics should show how they change depending on specific decisions — increasing marketing budgets, retargeting audiences, etc. This allows managers to properly choose investment directions to get expected returns.
   

For building such analytics, it’s effective to use specialized tools, particularly from Ringostat. The tool helps not only track conversion from different channels, but specifically calls — one of the most valuable conversion types for many businesses. According to Ringostat data, phone inquiries often generate the highest average transaction value sales, which is especially important for B2B sectors and high-value retail. Having accurate data about the effectiveness of advertising sources generating calls, you can strategically shift advertising budget toward the most effective channels.

An example of this approach can be seen in the case study of digital agency iWeb’s collaboration with Cargo driving school. Agency specialists essentially rebuilt the company’s strategy from scratch, starting with identifying key problems:

• lack of understanding of target audience;
• unclear product value;
• disconnect between marketing and sales goals.

Specialists formed a clear marketing and sales management structure, created analytics and reporting systems for specific business goals. This systematic approach allowed moving from chaotic promotion to a cohesive strategy where every marketing element works toward a defined result. As a result, the driving school received not only an improved set of educational services, but also a detailed action plan with clearly defined timelines, necessary costs, and responsible parties for each task. Unified understanding of target audience and product value brought together owners, management, and employees, creating a foundation for sustainable business growth.

Where should managers start: practical advice

The right approach is to start not with design, changing ad messages, or forming effective calls-to-action, but with building an effective management system.

First, managers need to establish interaction with the team or promotion contractors. They should set specific goals, measurable in financial indicators, for example:

• increase sales by $1 million per year;
• reduce lead cost by 15%;
• improve SMM profitability by 23%.

Feedback should also be tied to financial goals. For example, if marketers or promotion contractors work on increasing reach, they should show exactly how this indicator affects revenue, profit, or profitability.

Second, managers should always focus on results, not methods. Among questions they should ask in meetings or discussions:

• How exactly are marketing indicators connected to financial ones? How will our revenue change if we invest an additional $20,000 in targeted advertising?
• What timeline can we achieve priority goals? What needs to change to reduce time costs by a week, month, year?
• How can we increase overall marketing profitability by 10%? Which channels need more investment, and which should be cut?

Third, managers should prefer modern dynamic reporting formats — dashboards, or control panels. They have these advantages:

• update in real-time or at specific intervals;
• provide overall situation overview, but specific indicators can be detailed when needed;
• ensure shared access to analytics, improving company department communication.

Dashboards can integrate with various software products and web services. For example, you can build them using Microsoft BI or Datawiz. By connecting accounting software and Google Analytics to them, you’ll be able to see connections between marketing and financial indicators, as well as their real-time dynamics.

Particularly valuable are tools providing comprehensive analytics across all customer interaction channels — not just website forms, but also calls and messenger contacts. According to Ringostat research, in some business sectors up to 70% of all conversions happen through phone calls, and seeing this channel in overall analytics is extremely important for making informed decisions.

Ringostat, in particular, also allows creating convenient customized dashboards without involving programming specialists. In such reports, you can group different advertising sources for better overview, configure data display for any period, control plan execution for leads and conversions.

In iWeb agency’s practice, this reporting approach significantly improved client interactions. Mutual understanding of goals enables synchronizing specialist efforts with the company’s business model. This reduces decision-making time and optimizes adaptation to market changes.

How to make the system work?

Building an effective online business promotion system is just the first stage. For stable long-term company development, you need to ensure its autonomous functioning. This functioning should account for changes, improvements, and rebuilds when necessary.

Here are the steps managers should take:

1. Clearly define responsibility zones. Every employee should have a specific task list and competency area, and most importantly — be accountable for results. For example, in a cohesive system context, marketers are responsible for lead attraction, sales department for conversion, technical team for data collection and storage.
   
2. Create an environment for testing new hypotheses. It’s important to launch every new marketing element as a hypothesis, not a fixed part of strategy. They should undergo testing with effectiveness comparison. For example, a new headline on the website’s main page should increase conversion by at least 0.6%. If this doesn’t happen, you need to look for alternatives or analyze reasons for lack of results.
   
3. Form an analytics system that not only evaluates dynamics but also compares metrics with strategic goals. Positive dynamics doesn’t always benefit business development — and this is clearly visible in comparison. For example, if lead cost decreased by 10% but customer lifetime value dropped by 30%, that’s rather a negative than positive result.
   
4. Ensure connection between marketers and sales department. Effective marketing doesn’t always mean effective sales. For example, changes in advertising messaging increased lead quantity but complicated sales managers’ work due to clients’ incorrect understanding of delivery terms. In the future, this could lead to collapse and revenue decline. This can be avoided if the sales department provides feedback and helps adjust the funnel.

iWeb specialists always build in possibilities for development and correction of online business promotion systems in their projects. For example, in the Sanstore online store case study, specialists created a cohesive ecosystem where the technical platform and marketing tools work as a unified mechanism for generating sales. The website was integrated with Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel for tracking user behavior, which allowed optimizing marketing campaigns. A particularly important element was the bonus and discount system for regular customers, integrated with payment systems, which not only increased average transaction value but also improved repeat sales indicators. Implemented SEO optimization with unique category and product descriptions ensured organic traffic growth. Choosing the flexible OpenCart platform simplified implementing new promotion tools during scaling, resulting in stable growth of construction and engineering materials sales.

Conclusions

Online promotion isn’t a set of tools or a fight for social media visibility. It’s part of a business system that should work for profit. If this isn’t happening, the system is either not configured or not managed.

For it to be effective, every marketing element must be built into the sales funnel, and analytics should reflect the real state of affairs. This will allow making data-based decisions and coordinating team actions.

Companies using a systematic approach gain competitive advantages. They don’t just exist online — they sell, grow, and adapt faster than others.