Sell, sell, sell
A lot of people get advertising and marketing mixed up, when in reality they have nothing in common. OK, that’s not strictly true; they’re both tools that businesses can use to improve their bottom line whether they’re using colourful adverts on roller banners or a sophisticated marketing campaign to sell an idea. I was speaking to a former colleague who had set up her own business and was telling me how liberating it was to not have to deal with advertising as her company didn’t actually create products or sell tangible items. That might be true, I told her, but you must be selling something to the public or other businesses. If you don’t approach the way you market your concept or idea in the same effective way that an advertising agency would approach selling a “thing”, then it won’t be long before you’re out of business. Sadly, she didn’t take my advice and I last saw her working as a temp in an office I did some consulting work in. Actually, she tried to hide from me but I spotted her just before she ducked down behind her computer….
Marketing and advertising may well require different skills, but they are really just two sides of the same coin; and that coin is sales. There isn’t a business in the world, even charities, that doesn’t rely on selling a thing or an idea to its present and potential customers. Marketing and advertising professionals know all the tricks that can achieve those sales, even if cold hard cash never actually changes hands.
A friend of mine once referred to marketing as “applied common sense” and I know what he means. You could create a perfectly serviceable marketing campaign simply by creating a few launch events, a bit of eye-catching publicity material and by getting yourself into the local newspapers. But that will only achieve so much when it comes to sales. The best marketers in the business know how to make people feel that they’ve always wanted a product or a concept that they only heard about for the first time thirty seconds earlier. And that takes a lot more skill than just good old-fashioned common sense!
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