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Sales and marketing are very different, but they have the same goal. Each finds and educates prospects and turns them into paying customers. It’s essential that both departments work and communicate well together.

Salespeople accomplish this through perfecting the sales pitch, handling objections, identifying opportunities and closing the deal. Sales is the art of technique and persuasion, many times one-to-one. Because sales is on the front line, salespeople can readily identify any shifts in attitudes about their product or service.

As defined by the American Marketing Association, marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. In short, marketing is designed to find out what customers want so the company can deliver it accordingly. The marketing department does this through studies and focus groups.

Marketing controls product development based on customers wants, helps set a price customers see as a value, chooses the sales channels to reach customers, and promotes the product.

Whether the marketing department is one person or an entire team, marketing efforts improve the selling environment by using promotional techniques such as advertising, sales promotion, publicity and public relations. Marketing invites interaction through Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. It also creates new sales channels, new products and all kinds of new opportunities.

Marketing brings customers in the door by creating a possibility. Sales gets the customers out the door with the product in hand. (Support keeps the customer coming back for more.) VIA is expert in the marketing communications field. We develop your message and communicate it through a variety of media. We research, plan, write, design and execute. We help you brand your product at every touch point, so that you can control your customer’s experience and deliver consistency to meet his or her expectations.

Call us to provide an effective marketing plan. Find, communicate, educate and turn your prospects into paying customers.

For more information about how we can help you market your service or process, give us a call at 219.769.2299 or send an email.

When companies buy traditional ads (newspaper, television or website banner ads), they are proclaiming a message to people who may or may not be actively seeking those goods or services and hoping the ad will trigger interest. With ever-increasing access to the Internet, relevancy plays a larger and larger role in bringing buyers and sellers together. With traditional advertising, information is “pushed” toward the potential buyer; “pull” marketing draws attention to your information because it answers a request.

Push marketing uses traditional tools like ads, brochures, press releases, etc. filled with product features and service benefits. The Internet is similar, filled with websites, banner ads and paid search word tactics. These messages are all created with outbound sales strategies.

Pull marketing uses the premise that people find companies and their products because they are looking for them. This method uses social sites to listen to, contribute information and otherwise engage people. Tools like organic search allow web content to be ranked according to the user’s keyword searches. You draw people in with relevant content in the hopes of engagement. Content strategies, optimization, keywords in articles and headlines, tag blog posts, etc. pull in your prospect rather than push out to them.

PR is an example of a tool that can be both push and pull marketing. No longer do you need to solely rely on rigid printed press releases (although they are still important). You can embed video, images, slide shows, and more into social media releases (SMRs) to be shared on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

While push marketing is more concerned with short-term results, pull marketing exists to create loyal supporters by setting a certain standard for their brand. At VIA, we’ve always talked about the media mix. These days, the mix needs to include both push and pull marketing strategies for getting customers to purchase your certain brand, product, or service.

For more information about how we can help you market your service or process, give us a call at 219.769.2299 or send an email.

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Not to be confused with branding your company, branding your services provides a great point of differentiation and perceived value. Two examples of this type of branding are found with UPS WorldShip™, their international shipping process, and UPS Quantum View®, created to help customers manage shipping information. UPS brands most of their processes as proprietary—available only at UPS.

Giving a company’s products or services different brand names is referred to as individual branding. One advantage of individual branding is that each product or service has a unique image and identity. This also facilitates the positioning of each product by allowing a firm to market its various brands differently.

VIA Marketing recently used individual branding to help Challenger Learning Center of Northwest Indiana better publicize its programs and events. When we first met our new client, we took a look at each of their nearly 20 program flyers. Laying the flyers side-by-side, they didn’t look like a family of programs from the same organization. We went to work and created a separate brand for each category based on its target audience. Now each program area (youth, education, public, corporate) has its own logo. Flyers within each program area carry a cohesive look while publicizing different events and learning opportunities.

Another client, Vanco Construction Services, wished to bring attention to the proven, quality processes they use daily in their business. As this method favorably differentiates them from their competition, VIA created an individual brand and sales sheet for their process: Vanco Vantage 3D.

For more information about how we can help you brand your service or process, give us a call at 219.769.2299 or send an email.

Let’s talk about it.