Sales or Marketing, which team will help bridge that wide gap between the prospects and the business? Are they two different departments or are they the same? If different, what makes them unique?
Marketing and Sales are two different departments working hand-in-hand to gain leads and prospects. Marketing is the first pitch to reach wider audiences. A channel to voice out your views and establish your product. This medium helps kindle interest in people. This basically the first process.
Sales is a narrow medium. A direct link connecting to the targeted audience. Reaching out directly to the potentials and converting them to customers. This step generally comes after identifying the targeted audiences, which is basically after marketing.
Marketing is a wider medium. Say, you are advertising your products on social media. You find your targeted audience from your page’s traffic. Then comes in Sales. With the information collected about the targets, reaching out to them personally. The main goal of the sales team is to understand the customer demands and help them buy the product.
Now, let us see how we can differentiate the different aspects of sales and marketing in a business to comprehend their roles in each category,
| Category |
Sales |
Marketing |
| Channel | A private channel to get connected to the audience directly. | A common advertising channel to reach a wider set of audiences. |
| Target | The audience needs a product similar to the one you are selling. Here, you only need to persuade them into buying it. In short, you reach out to a set of known targets. | You don’t know who your potentials are. You need to establish your product and find out who your target audience could be. Your targets here are unknown, you need to find them using your marketing techniques. |
| Medium | Directly reach out to the audience through specific mediums. | A marketing medium where your advertisement could easily reach the targeted audiences. The most popular medium in this era is the digital market. |
There is no weighing balance between sales and marketing as they both weigh equal. They both when integrated together will help reach the business reach new heights. One important skill of running a good business is learning how to combine sales and market and work hand-in-hand.
A good marketing strategy kindles the interest of people. And, in today’s era, the digital market is a way to reach out to a wider audience easily.
Now, how can you make your product a well-known one? Here are ten sneaky ways to build your brand with digital marketing
Customer insights are the base for both marketing and sales. As mentioned earlier, sales and marketing go hand-in-hand, having a good business comes with a great marketing strategy and a good sales pitch. Market your product in such a way that they sell without any extra effort!
Why do you stop at the traffic signal when the color shows red? Why does the color of your national flag tingle a sense of patriotism in you?
These rhetorical questions help us understand the role of colors in our life. Colors add a sense of emotions and feelings to the objects around. They are the first thing that attracts a person’s eye. Colors are one of the factors that help us to differentiate things. They are entitled with a sense of meaning.
Colors do have a specific role to play when it comes to marketing and sales. Come let’s dwell into the chromatic zone of marketing and sales.
Colors used for the website design are like two-sided knives. They can enhance the look and feel of your website. On the other hand, they can dim the complete website.
Staring from the anatomy of colors can help us understand more about the role of colors in our website. Understanding of color palette is not just limited to an artist’s territory, but also to content creators and digital marketing consultants. A knowledge about colors will be an eye-opener in regards to the right usage of colors to attract customers more effectively.
A color wheel / palette is a combination of primary, secondary, tertiary colors, and a combination of their tints, shades, and tones.
The above mentioned set of colors are broadly bracketed to cool and warm colors. Now, understanding these colors and choosing the right set of contrast colors to the webpage design is an important part.
Contrast colors will help distinguish the different segments of your webpage more prominently. This will increase the readability of the website. Also, the usage of right colors visually soothes the eye of the reader thus helping them intake more content. This will also help drive traffic to the website more frequently.
In a written format projected in 2d, colors add the ice to the cake. This visual experience provided by colors lays down the path to reach the customers heart.
Colors enhance the retainment value. Human cognition is a blend of various factors like perception, grasping, and processing. With right colors invoking the right emotions, it will become easy to grasp and process the content much more effectively. Something that captures the customers’ memory will stand out in the market for a longer duration.
A brand is recognized by its logo. What makes a logo attractive is the design and the colors used. Colors add meaning to these logos and help reach a larger crowd.
Now having discussed the importance of colors, let us move to colors that lure the customers the most.
Grabbing one’s attention and to prolongedly retain it is no child’s play. Colors help do this job. They pull the correct emotional string that helps sales and marketing reach high pitch. Come let’s look at a few commonly used colors that are proven to increase sales:
Red, as we all have been imbibed with, is the color of attention calling, danger, and power. It easily attracts the eye. This color arouses a sense of passion in people.
In marketing terms, red has been a globally recognized color for discounts. As the color is associated to invoke a sense of urgency, it is commonly used in the Buy Now buttons of e-commerce websites.
Use it wisely, too much of attention to the page will lose all the attention.
The things in blue evokes a feeling of serenity. The blue sky, the ocean, and all such things blue in nature. Blue denotes tranquillity.
In marketing terms, this color can be used in financial sites where trust is the key as the color evokes a sense of trustworthiness .
Use blue to project serious matters that require calm thinking.
Greenery is associated with prosperity. With green related to nature, they can mostly be used in product pages relating to organic things. As green could also denote good health, this color could also be used in promoting health related sectors.
Using green promotes right conscience and good will, but too much of green dilutes the attention needed.
This color denotes royal. White could be a universally used background screen color. However, it could be more than that. A sense of calmness can be brought with this color. Texts in white with an appropriate contrast color are more visible and appealing to the eyes.
Using the royal white in your website design is mostly unavoidable.
Black is one of the most commonly used font colors when it comes to website design. This color denoting bold holds a sense of authority. Like white, this color is also unavoidable when it comes to website designs.
While using this brawny color, ensure to understand the emotions of the intended audience of the locale you are addressing.
This bright color is majorly used to highlight an important aspect that needs major attention. This happy color promotes the mood of the viewers.
Using colors wisely is a smart move. Though the word ‘colorful’ attracts crowds, certain colors are associated with certain emotions of people belonging to certain regions. Using them with proper context is the key to best marketing. No digital marketing consultant would want to press the wrong emotional button!
Spread colors. Spread positivity. Grow your Market.
Rebranding is more like reestablishing or rebuilding your product or service by varying the aesthetic layer like logo, name, or slogan. Rebranding does not have any scheduled time plot. It just happens when the market demands. So, a few such scenarios where rebranding becomes an absolute necessity are detailed in the upcoming sections.
In this scenario, the new name of the company could plausibly be formed by combining the former names. The same applies to the logo as well. For instance, when the two popular airline players Continental Airlines and United Airlines merged their companies back in 2010, they decided to retain the name as United Airlines and the logo of the global Continental icon. After a few years, they decided to rebrand the name again to United.
When a company is acquired by another company, rebranding becomes an essential tool. This is done to announce to the world about the change. A few companies that went through rebranding after acquisition includes Siri after being brought by Apple and Procter & Gamble became Gillette.
Other than merging of companies and company acquisition, sometimes rebranding comes into play even when a company is taken over by a fresh mind and the fresh mind seeks to have a refreshing revamp. Let us take the example of “The Huffington Post”. The company initially got rebranded in 2011 as HUFFPOST and later again in 2017 when the company’s CEO Arianna Huffington resigned and Lydia Poll Green took over the helm. In this case, not only was there a minor rebrand to the logo or the name but a major revamp to the company’s website as well. So when there are fresh minds, fresh thoughts brew.
A few times, the company might have taken a move with something in mind but might have ended up with something else. Now, the undesired results would create a wrong image that starts to send wrong signals to the customers about the product. In such cases, rebranding is vital for regaining the lost market. We could consider the example of Burberry. They had lowered their prices in the 90s to gain popularity. However, unexpectedly this move yielded an opposite outcome that was not desired. The low prices of the product made it accessible even to the cardinal man, making the high-class people feel the brand unworthy. This led to a steep decrease in the market. They took this hurdle as an opportunity and rebranded their brand, Changed the logo and scaled laterally high back.
Change is inevitable and is constant as is the likes of the customers. Their preferences and needs change over time and every brand needs to stay inline. For example, MTV – a popular TV brand among the 80s and 90s teens, got revamped as the 80s and 90s teens got prompted as adults. The target audience of MTV got shifted to the current generation teens and they had to strategize accordingly. They decided to rebrand their logo to showcase to the world that they are flexible with the current generation needs.
A crystal clear mission statement is imperative for a company’s branding. However, sometimes there are instances when you will have to deviate from the mission stated initially as the product advances. An example of one such case is the Airbnb product, an alternative stay for vacations and experiences away from home. They started off as an app to help the budget travellers a spare couch to rest upon. As the people started to demand upscale places to put at, the company had to shift from offering extra couches to beachfront homes. This intern demanded a rebranding. They had revamped to get a new logo and an upbeat slogan to adapt to their new mission.
Many times when a brand becomes obsolete, rebranding acts as a customer arresting move to capture the latest and updated demographic. The company needs to stay arrested in the customer’s mind and for which publicity plays a major role. One such example is Apple. The company has changed its logo tone now and then to stay put with the current moods. They retained their famous Apple logo and made moderation to the colour of the logo several times.
Now, if your company has gone through any of the above scenarios, then it is high time to get rebranded. A guide to rebranding involves the below 12-steps.
Step 1: Reanalyze your company’s mission and values. Check if it matches your current product and marketing trend.
Step 2: Reanalyze your demographic. What type of clientele do you or your brand target? Check if your brand appeals to your target demographics.
Step 3: Create focus groups with customers and hear out their opinions on your current brand.
Step 4: Research the market and check the relevance of your company branding. Check your competitors and their marketing strategies.
Step 5: Brainstorm ideas to rebrand your brand and stay relevant to your product.
Step 6: Rewrite your mission statement to fulfil the current scenario.
Step 7: Redesign your logo, decide patiently and have numerous options.
Step 8: Redesign all your marketing materials.
Step 9: The above step includes revamping all your product style guides.
Step 10: Redesign your website or your application’s User Interface.
Step 11: Inform your customers about the rebranding.
Step 12: Relaunch your brand again.
Now, revisit your product and sway the 12-step magic wand if you feel the need for rebranding.
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