How Sales and Marketing Work Together
Sales are down. The first reaction of many managers is to think that the salespeople aren’t doing their job and that they are not closing or working hard enough.
Sometimes that is the case. Often it is not.
As I learned early in my career, great marketing makes sales easier. It makes brands valuable and memorable to customers.
And marketing in the age of digital and social media is even more important as most customers do their research on the web long before they talk to a salesperson.
So if you don’t have the right online presence, you likely do not make the cut.
Sales and Marketing Go Hand-In-Hand
Marketing determines the customer niches a company pursues. Trying to appeal to broad, ill-defined audiences is a luxury few clients have and is a recipe for ineffective marketing.
Often, company leadership hasn’t taken the time to create effective marketing strategies and offerings that allow the sales team to be more effective. Think of it this way, if you aren’t speaking effectively to your target audience they aren’t going to know to spend their money with you!
What Makes an Effective Marketing Strategy
Developing strong marketing strategies and programs that support sales takes time and work. It starts with an understanding of your value proposition in the eyes of your customer. Mapping your customer’s journey, and how they found out about your brand and were converted to loyal customers, is essential.
Understanding your customer is essential to developing effective marketing strategies that boost sales. When you don’t know what it is they need or what problems they need solving, you can’t hope to speak to those needs that would otherwise lead to a conversion. And remember to dig into your data often as these needs change over time.
Equally necessary is making sure that your brand evolves as needed to retain its value in this age of ever escalating competition and faster product life cycles.
These principles apply to B2B and industrial sales just as they do to consumer sales and marketing. Influencers and word of mouth have always been powerful marketing tools.
The bottom line: you have to invest in your marketing, both in time and resources.Marketing shouldn’t be an afterthought. It is what really helps drive your sales, so you have to put time and effort into your strategy. With as noisy as the digital world is and organic content getting less and less reach, you have to be willing to invest money into paid advertising that works in concert with your organic marketing content, like newsletters and social updates.
Some Marketing Best Practices
Now is a good time to have a little refresher on a few marketing best practices, so let’s dive right in!
- Make it engaging. Engaging content encourages not just likes, but comments, shares, and clicks! One of the most engaging forms of content is video. Some other options include user generated content (UGC) where users share photos of themselves using or showing off your product, polls, and questions.
- Provide information. Users want valuable content; in other words, information that can help them. This is known as content-rich marketing. This information may be showing how a product works, answering some FAQs on a service you offer, or general updates about your company. Organic social content, blog posts, and newsletters are all great ways to share valuable information.
- Stick to a schedule. Social media and target audiences reward reliability. Create a schedule for blogs, newsletters, and social posts and you’ll see an increase in engagement and conversions!
Final Thoughts
Everyone in your organization can impact sales and should know the value of a new customer. When an organization has this customer-driven culture, powerful results can follow. The alternative of old school, pushy sales approaches seldom work in the new age of marketing.
Work with an Invested Partner
If you are ready to have an invested marketing partner, Attuned would love to help! We are different from most marketing firms as we believe in a holistic approach that connects various aspects of your business. We are truly invested in helping you reach your marketing and sales goals.
Remember, we are all in sales, but we often have marketing problems that are holding us back and keeping us from realizing our goals. Attuned can help you connect the dots and reach your goals.