Business Marketing & Sales 101

After all, marketing is about first “gaining favourable attention” for yourself and/or your products so that you can, second, gain sufficient time and attention with a prospective customer to persuade them of your value proposition (ie: to sell to them).

Sometimes, it’s really clarifying to put this relationship into the simplest of terms, and to ask ourselves some of the simplest questions, one of which could be, “What do we want to happen when our marketing works?”

The Desired End Result of Your Marketing

You may want your marketing to do for you what an optimistic friend of mine used to ask of callers to his office on the days when he was playing golf: His door sign read, “If we’re not here, please just shove your money under the door. Thanks, Tom.”

I’ll give Tom one thing: At least there was a clear “call to action” in that little sign – which is more than I can say for much of the advertising I see.

Yes, sure, there are “awareness building ads” that just spout a brand name but you have to pour a lot of money into that type of advert on the side of a bus or on television or in a crowded newspaper to gain any sort of awareness for your brand from the small portion of the vast public who just might buy from you – and even then, they may just like you (so the ad worked) . . . and then buy from someone else! (After all, you didn’t ask them to do any differently, did you?)

Tell Them What to Do

So, Marketing Rule #1: Be clear on what you want to happen if your marketing works. For the online seller, that may be “go to my website so that I can pitch to you”; for the retailer it may be, “come to my store, so that I can sell to you”; and for the service businessperson it may be, “call me so that I can understand your challenge – and then solve it for you”.

In many cases, the desired end result of an excellent piece of marketing is to have a person with the potential to become a new high-value customer, to believe that there is a chance that you can get them what they want, and to have them make direct phone, email or in-person contact with you.

Getting that simple fact clear should then shape your marketing content and strategy.

Check Up

Now might be a good time to pause, and bring to mind your own marketing, and to ask yourself (or someone else), “How clear is the course of action that I am asking my target audience to follow?”.

If you’d like a Free Marketing Appraisal,  email us your two best marketing pieces (one can be your website if that’s one of your top two strategies). I’ll give you an honest, warts-and-all score and maybe a few suggestions for quick and easy improvements around what you already have.