I once heard a simple definition of marketing which I have always quite liked, and I find myself coming back to time and time again; 'Marketing is about creating a demand for our product or service.
' How come? In other words, many people in our consumer-driven world don't know exactly what they are looking for.
Perhaps they are waiting for the 'next big thing'.
It may be a business opportunity.
Or for a woman it might simply be a new outfit or for the latest woman's magazine (that's perhaps why these are often strategically displayed at the entrance to the supermarket checkout!) In many cases, they don't even know that they have a particular need for the product or service that we are offering until we show up! So in these cases, marketing is about creating awareness within our prospect of a (perhaps) latent need for our product or service.
Marketing then, needs to involve making our prospect aware of the (previously unrealized?) benefits to them of purchasing our product or service.
As such, marketing needs to involve an on-going education process of the features and benefits of our product or service and of what it can do to help them.
Research tells us that a prospect needs at least seven 'points of meaningful contact' before they will buy.
With normal marketing, that will include face to face contact, telephone, email, blogs etc with our prospects.
With internet marketing however these methods are not as easy and so 'list-building' and the use of auto-responders becomes so important.
We also know that 'people buy from people' and so this is where 'attraction marketing' comes into the process.
This is about building credibilty and trust with the prospect - not just in the product or service but in us as the marketer.
On that basis, 'personal branding' then becomes an important component of marketing.
But that's another huge subject on its own.
By comparison, sales is the (final) process that takes place to 'get the prospect over the line'.
If our marketing system has done its job, then this should happen almost automatically.
Sales then, is the event where the actual purchase is made whereas marketing is the prior activity required to get our prospect to that point.