Obviously, selling is a trade in which goods or services are exchanged for currency. But for the purposes of this article, and in marketing in general, selling something means selling the idea that clients need your product. It’s not just when they’re physically buying the product; it should begin once they’ve started “wanting” the product. That’s the power of selling that’s often overlooked.
What Does Selling Need?
To sell something, you must first hit these basic questions:
- What the customers need
- What I can offer
- How can I deliver
It is in these three things where every good sale happens. As a business, you’re offering a solution to a problem. That problem is finding out what the community or industry needs as a whole, delivering their demands, and eventually fulfilling their orders. But simply offering solutions to problems won’t do. You need to understand how to express convincing points better, and that’s the value of marketing.
The Importance of Marketing
Marketing is done in the attempt to boost a business’ name reputation. It can garner you maintain clients, and if done right, can be a significant contributor to your overall business performance. Here are a few tips to help you market your services and products better.
Hook them Emotionally
Humans are naturally emotional beings. That’s why we get convinced more when people play to our emotions instead of logic. Take, for example, a vacation rental business will do well if it angles its marketing materials to show the beauty and grandeur of its location. It will hook people emotionally as if telling them “an important event can happen here”. And that’s really the premise of marketing: it’s showing how your product can emotionally affect them.
If communicated properly, it should be enough. Look at major brands like Apple or Ferrari. Their prices are higher than their competitors, but the value of the emotional experience they are selling justifies the price point.
Reward Existing Customers
The interesting thing is that when you market discounts and benefits to existing customers, you’re accomplishing a two-fold objective: keep your existing customers while enticing new ones to join you. People naturally have both curiosity and fear of missing out and by showing how much you value your current clients, they’ll feel like it’ll be worth trying out your company. Of course, keeping your current clientele happy works to your benefit as they’re more likely to leave a good word for your company as well.
Pay Attention to Your Competitors
Look at what your business rivals and peers are doing. You don’t have to imitate or emulate what they’re doing. Simply gain an understanding of what works and what doesn’t, and you’ll learn a lot more when it comes to approaching your own marketing content. This isn’t just limited to marketing materials. You’ll most likely observe some business best practices that will put things into perspective.
Perhaps your issue with marketing is that you don’t redirect the attention to a product page or a means to avail of your products or services. These matters sound so obvious until you see someone else doing something like it and realizing you’ve overlooked an important aspect of your business.
Deliver in Quality
You won’t be able to pull off a good marketing campaign and boost your sales if your very product or service doesn’t deliver in quality. Your biggest marketing material is the quality of the products that you release. So don’t skimp on quality! You’ll find that when a business puts in the effort to create good products and services, people remember them more and are more likely to patronize them.
This is crucial as often, businesses only really rely on the personality of their staff rather than the actual credibility or function of the product they’re selling. So don’t just focus on marketing, think of the product that they’re actually going to use.
Market Specifically
You’ll simply be wasting time and money trying to market to a general audience. Instead, find out the specific market for your product and put your efforts there. You’re most likely to get leads there, and it’s also highly likely that the leads you get through can be turned into paying customers. So make sure you pay attention to your current client base and start your market discovery journey from there.
Any business needs to sell more. But selling on its own isn’t a particularly easy feat- that’s why you need to learn marketing as well. There’s a lot of testing and finding out what works, but once you’ve found out what works for you, it’ll take you to the moon.
