Sales and Marketing Explained

The two most essential skills you need, unless you're a civil servant and is more than comfortable with what they earn. By the way, don't mind any misspellings or grammatical errors, I'm typing this directly from reddit.

Even if we call it Sales and Marketing, it should actually be Marketing and Sales, because the first thing you do is market, then you sale.

Marketing is attracting potential customers by promoting awareness, interests, and desire for a product or service. the goal for marketing is to generate leads(potential customers) and build brand visibility. Regardless of how good your product or service is, people have to see it in order for them to buy it. The Iphone wouldn't be what it is today if nobody saw it. there might be phones that are better than Iphones and Samsungs out there, but as long as we never see them, they aren't that good. They say a product is what people think it is. Marketing brings your product to the peoples eyes. It shouldn't just be any people, it should be people that would buy. It's not marketing if you're promoting to the wrong people. You do Nail Tech and you're promoting to guys? You sell cars and you're promoting to highschoolers? That's not marketing. Ever wonder why most popular book Authors aren't awarded the 'Best Author' title? they are awarded the 'Best Seller' title. You don't need to be the best at something or have to have the best product for it to sell the most, you just have to be good at marketing.

The first step of marketing is building a Buyer Persona. this is basically an imagination of what your potential customer is like. Their age, their gender, their interests, their location, their income, do they have kids, do they have a spouse, their occupation. these aren't fixed answers, they are mostly range answers. Say I'm selling skin care products, I have to do research about the people that buy skin care products. for example, we say their age is between 20-45, 80% Female and 20% Male, they stay in Lusaka, they earn between k3,500 K6,500, 80% have kids, 70% have spouses, occupations including teachers, nurses, assistants, secretaries, entrepreneurs, etc, interested in telenovelas, zee world.

once you have these range you look for the average. 30 year old mom who is a civil servant in lusaka earning k4,500. she also happens to be interested in telenovelas. You align your product to favor this woman. make your brand suit this woman's interest. if it's your own product, give it a name that will catch their attention, do the same for your shop. If you're going to run promotion ads, flyers or banners, include stuff that will resonate with them. we all know civil servants work for hours, include stuff like 'lasts 12 hours' 'heat resistant', or whatever skin care products do. just make sure to give them more reasons to buy than they have reasons not to buy.

There's so many ways to market, but I'll let you all google them for yourselves.

So this is basically an introduction to marketing, if you going to market your products or services online, there's more you have to learn, but if you want to speed things up you can look for an expert to do the marketing for you, but understanding some basics will still help you communicate your needs better to that person.

After marketing comes the Sale. If you've done your marketing well, the sale will be automatic. One secret about selling though: say 'Thank You'. show the client or customer that you appreciate them. It seems useless, but that thank you can get you free referrals from your client.