Sales, Marketing, and Advertising (How They’re Different Yet Work Together)
January 6, 2020 Written by DigitalRealtyX
Increasing number of businesses now abundantly spend on their advertising and marketing campaigns to drive more sales. But the terms “sales”, “advertising”, and “marketing” are now so abundantly used by businesses and marketers that they have lost their true meaning in the process.
Ask businesses with a marketing budget of thousands of dollars about the difference between marketing and advertising and most would fail. As a matter of fact, even the majority of the marketers would be unable to point out the differences.
While there is no denying that these terms work together to help a business grow, it is important to know the differences in order to understand how they work. To start with, let us first have a look at the meaning of these terms.
Sales
It can be defined as a direct process where your salesperson drives a customer towards a purchase and the customer actually purchases the product or service. It can be defined as a transaction where a business receives payment for their product or service.
Marketing
Marketing requires a marketing plan. A plan which requires a lot of research, time, and preparation which makes your product or service ready for the market. In the process, you develop a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) for your product or service which sets you apart from your competitors. Based on this proposition, you can then work out your mission statement and build a marketing strategy.
Advertising
Advertising plays a supporting role in your marketing campaigns. Its primary goal is to make sure that your product or service receives the right exposure. Other goals of advertising include generating curiosity in your target audience, work out buy-ins, and help your marketing campaign by improving conversions.
Advertisements are generally targeted, concise, and feature a call to action. An imperative voice is used in ads where businesses tell the audience what to do. Marketing aims at influencing people but it is not as persuasive or direct as advertisements.
How Marketing and Advertising Impact Sales?
Marketing and advertising can also be defined as subsets of your final goal – sales. They are both very important for any business aiming to improve their performance metrics.
While marketing and advertising can provide you with hard data which can help you know the language, content, and information that your potential customers most respond to, a sale is a process through which your salespeople can get firsthand information directly from their customers. This direct information is often impossible to collect through marketing and advertising.
Sales, Marketing and Advertising as Separate Entities: An Opportunity Missed
A large number of businesses let sales, marketing and advertisement operate as individual entities separate from each other. It is crucial to understand that they actually complement each other and it is only by effectively aligning these aspects that a business would actually be able to achieve its objectives.
As a matter of fact, several studies have reported that businesses that strongly align their sales with marketing and advertising are able to generate more leads, close more sales, retain a higher number of customers, have shorter sales cycles, and grow faster.
Rethink your business tactics if your marketing and advertising efforts are unable to deliver the expected sales. Understand the difference between the three and try to understand how they still work together in order to help a business grow.