Sales & Marketing 101: Reaching the Right People with the Right Message
By: Aria Spears
We wanted to share this updated version of a past blog post because it contains marketing gold.
Sales, Marketing, and Branding
WHY IT MATTERS
Marketing includes all of the activities and processes for: creating, communicating, and delivering offerings that create value for customers, clients, partners and society at large.
A business sales and marketing strategy is your plan for reaching, engaging, and converting your target market into profitable and loyal customers. The goal behind a marketing strategy is to promote your product or service in order to achieve sales and revenue.
5 PS OF MARKETING
According to Investopedia, marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses.
Marketing comes down to the four P’s of marketing:
Price
Product
Place
Promotion
There is one more “P” that is the most important component of marketing; which is people. Knowing who your customers are and who you are wanting to buy from you is key in figuring out how to price your products, what products to stock, where to put them, and how to promote them to reach your customers.
SALES
A business can execute a strong marketing plan but still sell the wrong products. It’s necessary for a business to create a selling strategy around the products it sells. Marketing is how you get your product or service in front of your ideal customers. Sales is when you turn awareness of your brand and products into a purchase. Marketing and selling go hand in hand but you can’t do one without the other. You could have the best product around but if no one knows about it, it won’t sell. Marketing and sales must work together in order for each other to succeed.
Selling comes down to a product or service that your business is offering to its ideal customer.
Products to sell depend on:
Income levels of your ideal customers
Personality of your ideal customers
Where your customers are located
Buying behaviors
There are a few reasons someone might make a purchase: rational and emotional motives. Rational motives are behaviors that are based on logic and reasoning. Emotional motives are buying behaviors that are based on a feeling or emotion. Establishing the motive behind the product or service a business provides, helps them message the value proposition correctly to their ideal customer.
BRANDING
A brand is the recognition and experience the consumer has with a company. A brand can also mean the feeling, aesthetic, consistent design or visuals, that define unique characteristics of the product or services. It also means the “brand voice”, or the communication style associated with the brand.
As copywriter Alex Cattoni says, the goal of a brand voice is to initiate “irrational” brand loyalty, which is what keeps customers coming back again and again.
Brand Recognition is when a product or service is identifiable by the greater public due to seeing and hearing a consistent company message (through consistent wording, design, and company personality) on a large scale.
Spirit Box Application
Each year new students and faculty enter your school building. Create a marketing and sales plan for how you will reach and engage your community. Ask yourself, why should our study body purchase from your Spirit Box, instead of another vending machine?
As a team, create a plan:
Current teams, don’t forget to use our resource portal! It is filled with lessons, PowerPoints, and worksheets to help strengthen your Spirit Box team.