Marketing vs Sales: Why Marketing is Just as Important as Sales?
In its most basic terms, sales is defined as the techniques and tools used to get a customer to sign a contract or make a purchase, which in turn generates revenue. And what would a business be without income? Revenue pays employees, covers operating costs, buys new inventory, mаrkеtѕ products, and makes investments. It is vital for creating long-term value for the organization. Whether we realize it or not, every business is in the business of sales. Dentists, movers, insurance agents, and bankers all require sales to maintain the success of the company.
In any business organization, sales is the department that generates revenue. No matter how good your manufacturing operation is, how cutting-edge your technology is, how tight your financial goals are or how progressive and forward-thinking your management techniques are, you must still have a sales mechanism in place, or everything else is useless.
The only question, of course, is that if the above is true, why are more and more contemporary businesses and entrepreneurs suggesting that product marketing is just as important (if not even more important) than physical goods sales themselves?
It is quite simple! Advertising and marketing must be in line with the sales strategies, since these also contribute to generating sales. Ad copy and marketing should be congruent with all branding materials in order to build brand awareness and increase visibility. Advertising and marketing work to support sales efforts, so one should never go without the other.
While it is sometimes difficult to draw the line at where the marketing process ends and the sales efforts begin, the sales effort is the effort that actually collects the money – or the obligation to buy, in the case of a purchase order or financed arrangement. The marketing effort creates favorable conditions for the sale to take place. In a nutshell, the marketer leads the horse to water, the sales team makes it drink.
Understanding the Modern Marketing Revolution
While no one can argue against the fact that any business needs to make steady sales in order to remain financially solvent, contemporary marketing itself is more important than ever when it comes to facilitating sales in the first place.
In the past, smaller retailers and new entrepreneurs would have to rely on word of mouth recommendations, storefront displays, and costly media publications in order to market themselves successfully.
In the meantime, bigger businesses have always usually divided sales and marketing into two separate departments.
However, leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging.
It’s vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points to reading your target audience’s online content and join discussions to learn what’s important to them and having a highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand which has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and –- perhaps most importantly -- your bottom line.
Why Marketing is Just as Important as Sales
Why marketing is steadily becoming more important than sales is simple. Market analysis of the past ten years has shown that new businesses and brands who embrace digital marketing from the outset, can often outshine their bigger branded competitors.
More than 90 percent of marketers through various researches have indicated that they use digital means for marketing and that social media marketing is important for their business. Sales teams said using social helps them reach their sales goals, consumers use social to research products and more than 30 percent of all web traffic is driven by the top eight social sites.
Brands like Uber and Fitbit simply didn’t exist 10 years ago. However, by employing contemporary digital and social media marketing techniques, each has risen to a become multi-billion dollar company in its own right.
Using Better Marketing to Directly Achieve Better Sales
Of course, it’s no secret that social media and online marketing have revolutionized marketing as we know it. However, contemporary online marketing practices are constantly blurring the lines between marketing efforts themselves and real world sales conversions.
Marketing via social media enables companies to develop a robust content strategy. Get to know your audience and listen to their feedback to develop content that addresses their pain points and answer the questions that arise during their customer journey. Pay attention to audience and customer behavior, as well, to identify success strategies so you can refine your strategies over time.
For instance, every business knows that they need to utilize platforms such as Facebook to expand their existing brand visibility. However, platforms like Facebook now also provide end users with the ability to make in-app purchases.
What this means is that for businesses who invest just as much (if not more) in marketing as they do sales, sales themselves can now be achieved directly through different kinds of marketing and advertising media.
Marketing vs Sales: Who Wins?
With online marketing tools now being employed to facilitate direct sales, is marketing slowly trumping traditional sales systems and techniques?
A bold answer to the above question would be to say, yes. Popular social media platforms such as Instagram are currently building in features such as shopping tags and ever more intuitive direct sales portals. The key thing to remember, though, is that marketing and sales techniques themselves are always going to be subjective.
Are you a non-online business or retailer? If so, you need to start complementing your physical sales with marketing. As of now, there isn’t a clear winner yet when it comes to marketing vs sales. That said, if current trends are anything to go by, better marketing will soon become synonymous with better real-time sales success. The only question is, are you ready to realize the benefits that better and more intuitive marketing can bestow on your business?
