Market your products more effectively PDF  | Print |
Sales and marketing are frequently clumped together however the art of selling has very little to do with the process of marketing. Let’s take a closer look at both processes to help you improve your market share.
The definition of marketing is ‘the action taken to create an opportunity to make a sale’. The definition of a sale is ‘trading goods or services for a consideration (usually money!)’ So this means you don’t need to have a ‘used car sales’ (sorry guys) approach to be good at marketing. Good marketing is more a matter of defining the factors involved in creating the sales opportunity such as branding, product knowledge, selling points, identifying your market, and pricing. Let’s break this down even more. It is necessary to identify all of these factors in detail for each of the products or services you intend to promote. 

Brand
Answer these questions about your business:
- How do you want to be known ie what makes you special? i.e. service, quality, special products, expertise, price, cost cutting, volume you can handle, complete service or specialist
- How will your customers recognise and find your business? i.e. uniform, colours and logo, special brand or franchise,
- What makes your customers buy from you? i.e. location, value, knowledge, service

Product or service
Answer these questions about the product you wish to promote:
- What is the product/service?
- What makes it special i.e. price, quality, unique to you, seasonal?
- Who will buy it? i.e. home owners, other businesses, young people, old people, specific gender or what?
- Who will not buy it? i.e. age, gender, end users or business?
- Is the price a major factor or selling point?
- What other businesses share the same customers?
- What else is common to this market?
- What is the worst feature of buying the product? Is there one?

The campaign
By identifying the specific features of your product and its target market we can use the information to create a campaign to maximise your opportunity to sell. Let’s apply the above exercise to a carpet retailer. Their campaign focuses on a special line of carpet and they have already identified their brand as providing the following:
Complete service from first contact to final installation; they have a recognised brand, they are experts in their field and have many years experience (show testimonials from satisfied customers) the product they are going to promote is carpet. The product’s unique features are: only available from them in this area, is multi-use (ie wool blend, hard wearing, easy care, suitable for stairs); is very competitively priced and has a large colour range. It is a manufacturer’s special discount offer. The target market is: home owners, renovators, spec builders. Other businesses who share this market are: builders, architects, home designers, plumbers, electricians, painters, building suppliers, and carpet cleaners.

The retailer can now put together a campaign by advertising in home features, having a building specific display (use building supplier or expo), provide a special offer to alliance partners who bring them leads like the builders etc. A letter box drop may be practical because for the size of their market. The worst feature of having new carpet can be the inconvenience, moving furniture and cleaning up the scraps so they may offer something in their advertising to compensate for this. To maximise their campaign results the sales staff must be trained in the product’s features, and the special offer. Now we must put into practice the art of salesmanship. Let’s leave that for next time!

If you need more information or assistance or would like a free marketing audit phone us now. We also have a complete Business Performance Index free on our website.
www.enact.co.nz
ENACT NZ LTD
Ph 0800 45 18 54
Your local Business Architects are Heather Byrne and Greg Abbott.
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