People, all over the world, have started talking about the fact that the buying journey is no longer linear. In this Vlog, Grant explains that this is not the case.
Is your website part of your sales or marketing?
Is your social media sales or marketing?
Well to know, you need to understand the difference between the two.
There are two fundamental differences, the first is simply this, marketing is there to generate opportunities for a business. Sales is about converting those opportunities into transactions.
However, on its own that isn’t enough. You see, cold calling was traditionally done by sales departments, but if marketing was about generating opportunities, and sales is about converting them, then surely marketing should’ve been doing the cold calls, so why was that sales?
You see, there’s a second part to the definition, marketing is responsible for brand to person communications. Whereas sales, is responsible for person to person communications.
So E-commerce platforms aside, a website is traditionally a marketing discipline because it’s brand to person communications, whereas, you may be surprised to know that social media should really be a sales discipline, because that in the main is person to person communications.
There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English
Comments
Hi Grant. Once again a great vid – my only slight disagreement is your statement about there being a difference between B2C and B2B in knowing where your client is in the AIDA cycle. I do not think this is necessarily the case. I think the biggest difference is potentially after the AIDA cycle where in B2B process you work your socks off transforming them from a customer to a client!
Our AIDA we like to use a fishing analogy with some short term and long term goals at each stage. I have listed the key areas of your business you need to focus on at each stage.
ATTRACT – THE CAST (SALES AND MARKETING)
INTEREST – THE BAIT (PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT)
DESIRE – THE BITE (CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT)
ACTION = THE STRIKE (OPERATIONAL MANAGEMENT)
DOUBLE ACTION = THE ‘KEEP NET’ (ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT – SHOW THAT WE CARE)
Looking forward to receiving your feedback 😉
Hi Austin, Thank you for your comments. I always enjoy receiving them. You’ll have to rewatch the vlog as I don’t think I commented that there was a difference between B2C and B2B in knowing where your client is. I just gave two different examples 🙂 I think that working to create loyalty from a customer can be equally applicable in B2C and B2B. It depends on what a company does. Thank you for sharing your AIDA fishing analogy. I would suggest that everything up to the purchase is marketing and sales as the customer hasn’t experienced the product or service yet. Once they experience it, fulfilling the promise, or operations, comes into play. Of course, post purchase, marketing and sales, account management and operational management can all be important.
Thanks Grant for taking the time to respond 😉 The angle (or should i say angler…bad joke) I am coming from is the fact the customer is effectively experiencing your product at every stage. The product itself has to be good enough to attract the interest and if it is attractive enough they might be toying (biting) with the thought of purchasing at the desire stage. This is when your front line staff really do have to be on top of their game to encourage them to move on to the action stage etc etc. This, as you state, supports the ‘linear’ buying cycle. But, as you have mentioned in a previous post, the key difference now is the fact that everyone within an organisation must understand that they are marketeers!! Should you not show that you care the client will simply swim away to another piece of bait!
Hi Austin. I quite agree. Marketing is no longer simply transactional but must provide value in its own right. Marketing is a product/service/experience in and of itself. Unless marketing provides value a company will not obtain the ‘attention’ of its audience. Thank you for your comments.