Are you Marketing or Selling?

When promoting products/ services, businesses often forget to market to their audience effectively. Marketing is crucial in building a relationship with your potential clients and to promote why your products and services should be chosen above your competitors. It is, therefore, extremely important it is implemented in the right way.


What’s the difference?

Many businesses go wrong by not understanding the true difference between sales and marketing. Although marketing is, undoubtedly, a major part of the sales process, it is a lot more than just that.

Marketing is the stage in which you build the brand you would like your clients to see and develop good relationships. It’s important for your clients to see your business positively, create consistency and build fruitful relationships.

Sales, on the other hand, is the process of delivering a product / service to your audience, the point at which they become a client. Understanding the difference and the importance of these two processes means that they can work more harmoniously together, essentially building a much better client journey which is a win-win for your business and revenue.


Why Marketing should come first

When it comes to marketing and sales, it can sometimes feel a bit like a “chicken and the egg” scenario. Businesses often dismiss marketing and focus purely on their sales targets.

By implementing a strong marketing strategy, you can make your brand more familiar with your potential clients whilst at the same time increasing sales revenue. If sales targets are a business’ main concern, then implementing a good marketing strategy will help them out more than simply using sales techniques alone – no matter how good they are.


So how do I go about doing this?

With any kind of promotion, it is important to, firstly, consider what your goals are. For many businesses, for example, a good goal would be to increase product sales or to widen their audience.

Defining your goals from the very beginning of the promotion process is key to ensuring that your promotion is a success. You need to understand exactly why you are doing what you are doing to implement the right strategy to meet the objectives.


Who is your audience?

It’s important to understand who your target audience is. This allows you to better target your promotion towards them. What we mean by this, is to get an idea of the demographics of the people you are promoting your products or services to.

Location and interests are amongst the most helpful as this information enables you to create content that matches their interest and target it to the areas where most of your potential clients are based.

To summarise, it is important to ensure that equal efforts go into both your marketing and sales strategies, to consider your goals, the clients you want to attract and how your strategy will attract and retain them. By building a good overall strategy, you will ensure a much better experience for your clients.