One of the most common factors to derail businesses is poor marketing.  Someone could have a brilliant business idea, but if the business is improperly marketed, the company may never achieve success.

What is the difference between sales and marketing?

I get this question all the time.  I suspect that the misunderstanding of what marketers do results from the multitude of business components that marketers manage.  To put it simply, sales involves a direct selling relationship where a salesperson is selling to a single entity such as a person or a company.  Marketing, on the other hand, is a far more broad type of selling to large numbers of people or groups of people.  Marketers can use a variety of tools such as advertising, public relations, guerrilla marketing, viral marketing, and customer relationship management (CRM).

Sales and marketing are two distinct functions, and depending on the requirements of your company, you may need to concentrate more on one than the other.  For example, if you owned a consumer software company, you would need salespeople to sell to software resellers.  Your salespeople would manage these accounts for the company, provide purchasing incentives to the resellers, and build relationships to retain these large customers.  At the same time you would need marketers to promote the product to the general public and encourage them to buy it online, from a catalog, or from their local store.  Both functions would be valuable to building your business.

If you were in an unsigned rock band, however, you would need to focus more on marketing than sales.  You might need some salespeople to handle the selling of your merchandise, such as t-shirts and CDs, but the main driver of your success would be public demand for your music, concert tickets, etc.  You would need marketers to create a strong brand for you, get publicity, manage your website, and advertise your latest musical endeavors.

To determine the needs of your enterprise, think about who your prospective customers are and the best way to sell to them.  Who are they?  Where are they located?  How can you get your message in front of them?

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 NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE

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Volume 1, Issue 1

Using Publicity to Drive Sales

Throughout my career I have met so many talented people who are struggling to build their businesses despite offering high-quality products and services.  They provide superior customer service and offer excellent value for the money, so what’s the problem?  In many cases it is simply down to not getting their message out to prospective customers. 

Consumers can’t buy a product if they don’t know it exists.  This presents a challenge to even the best small business owners and solo entrepreneurs.  Amidst the noise from TV, radio, point-of-purchase displays, newspapers, magazines, billboards, signs, and even video screens at gas station pumps, consumers are bombarded by multitudinous advertising messages each day.  It is increasingly difficult to stand out from competitors, particularly if those competitors have large advertising budgets.

Advertising is certainly an effective way to get your marketing message out, but it’s also very expensive.  Fortunately there are some less expensive ways to reach prospective customers to drive your sales.  One of these methods is to develop a public relations (PR) strategy in which you provide news to media outlets for the purpose of getting media exposure that will reach your prospects. 

Publicity gained from PR efforts is valuable because it is perceived very differently from advertisements.  Audiences know that an ad has been purchased, so the content it contains is only going to favorably promote the advertiser.  In contrast, media coverage has more credibility because the company does not have control over the content, therefore it is perceived as more accurate and balanced than advertisements.

As you can imagine, journalists, editors, and producers are practically assailed with press releases.  Below are tips to improve your chances of getting the press coverage you want:

1) Focus your efforts toward publications and programs that appeal to your target audience. 

For example, if you are promoting an interior design business it wouldn’t make sense to send a press release to a sports magazine.  By sending your news to outlets that cater to your target demographic, you will greatly increase your chances of getting coverage.

2) Make sure your press releases provide real news and value to media outlets. 

Their main concern is providing content that will interest their audiences, so pitch your story ideas with their audiences in mind.  It is important to remember that media outlets are not in business to promote your company.  Will their viewers want to stay tuned after the commercial break to hear a story about the fact that you’ve been in business for five years?  If not, it’s time to come up with a better story to pitch.

3) Journalists, editors, and producers have very tight deadlines. 

They don’t have time to keep chasing sources for additional information and photos.  Make sure you have supporting information and graphics or photos ready to send before you even contact journalists.  As soon as they request information, send it to them immediately.  Also very important is to send materials in exactly the format that is requested.  If one journalist wants you to copy and paste information into an email while another wants a Microsoft Word attachment, respect their requests.  If you are asked to send photos in a high-resolution TIFF format, don’t send a low-resolution GIF.  The easier you make it for journalists, the better your chances of getting coverage.

4) Make sure your press release answers: who, what, when, where, why, and how. 

Your first sentence should contain the most important information so that even if someone only read the first sentence, the general message of the press release would be clearly understood.

5) Brevity is a virtue. 

Before you even call a journalist, write down three bullet points you’d like to tell that person.  If you get to talk about even one of your points, you’ve done well.  Journalists have so many schedule demands that they can’t spend loads of time on the phone listening to every detail about your business.  Be quick, be professional, and be friendly.  Also, make sure any written communication is concise and clear.  Make sure all press releases are no more than one page.

6) Pestering the media will not help your cause. 

When you send press releases set your fax machine to confirm that your fax went through or set up your email so you know your message was received.  If a follow up is necessary, make it fast and pleasant.  After that, leave the media outlets to do what they will.  They have all sorts of stories in the pipeline, so you may not make it into this issue or onto their next program.  That doesn’t mean your next press release won’t receive coverage, however.  Remain focused and positive.  Building publicity for your business is a process that will take time.

7) Work to build a positive relationship with the media. 

By providing stories that have value to an audience and being easy to work with, you’ll increase the chances that journalists will remember you the next time they need a quote for a story related to your area of expertise.

Volume 1, Issue 2

Create a Survey to See What Customers Want

I often hear clients wonder aloud, “What do customers want?”  My answer is simply, “Ask them.”  Believe me, customers are not shy about giving you their opinions.  If you ask, they will tell you the good and the bad points about your business.

Getting new customers is significantly more expensive than retaining existing customers, so time and money spent finding out how to satisfy and even delight your existing customers is certainly well spent.  It can pay off tremendously by helping you increase your sales.

Whether you use a traditional written survey or an online survey, the methods of ensuring that you get useful information are the same.  Below are tips to ensure that your survey is successful: 

1) People are busy, so how can you get them to take time to fill out a survey?

While people don’t mind giving their opinions, they are very busy.  An effective way to give them a reason to take the time to fill out a survey is to offer some kind of reward for completion.  You could offer a coupon for a discount on a future purchase, a gift certificate, or a sweepstakes entry for a bigger prize.

2) Make your survey questions clear and concise. 

The longer your survey is, the less likely people will take the time to complete it.  It is important to get a high response rate because that will give you more thorough information to use in determining how to improve your business.

3) Make sure you can use the information you get. 

If you write a survey asking customers to evaluate your customer service, you not only want to know how it rates, but why.  Knowing about customer approval or disapproval without knowing specifically why customers feel that way won’t help you make the necessary changes. 

If customers rate your company’s customer service as “poor”, you’ll need to know why so you know what to improve.  Are customers dissatisfied because they’re being kept on hold too long?  Is it because you don’t offer a next-day shipping option?  Unless you follow up on that survey question by asking why customers gave a certain rating, you’ll only get partial information that is difficult to use effectively.

4) Expect the unexpected. 

At the end of your survey, have a few blank lines where people can give any comments about issues you may not have asked about in the survey questions.  This section of the survey can often be the most revealing because you will learn about unexpected problem areas you can correct.  Additionally, you’ll often receive compliments about your company’s strengths, which is exciting, if anything.

Volume 1, Issue 3

Social Media: Hype or Help?

The frenzy over how to use social media as a marketing tool reminds me of the heady days of the dot-com gold rush in the 90s.  With everyone in business looking for the latest and greatest ways to increase sales, can applications like Twitter, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo really deliver on the fulfillment of such lofty business expectations?

Here are a few considerations to help you determine how large a role social media should play in your overall marketing strategy:

1) How much time are you spending on social networking sites? 

While these sites provide yet another opportunity to post a virtual billboard on the information superhighway, they need to be maintained with fresh content, which can take a considerable amount of time that could be spend on other sales activities. 

2) Are your social networking efforts increasing your sales? 

Is the time spent maintaining these sites commensurate with the sales they drive to your business?  Are you even able to measure how much business is driven by these activities?  Branding activities can be very worthwhile, but it’s important to implement some sort of mechanism that enables you to track where customers are coming from so you know where to focus your efforts.

3) Are you capturing visitor contact information for future marketing activities? 

People who visit your social networking sites most likely have some level of interest in what you do.  They also have busy lives and get distracted, so it’s important to have some way of getting in touch with them in the future so you can let them know about your new business offerings.  People who have already visited your sites online are some of the most qualified leads you can get.  Getting them to follow you on that particular social networking site is good, but getting their email addresses for future marketing is even better.  Direct contact information from qualified leads is marketing gold.

4) Are social networking sites driving traffic to your website? 

With the tremendous number of demands on people’s attention, their interests can quickly move onto other things.  Consider the mass migration of people from MySpace to Facebook.  Now Twitter is the hot form of social media, but there will undoubtedly be other sites coming in the future that will attract users away from the forms they currently use.  It is valuable to have sites on social media where people can discover you, but then convert them to using your website as the primary hub for information about your company.  

5) Be ready for change. 

As new forms social media are added to the already mind-bending vortex of Internet offerings, be ready to go where the action is.