Tip #628 – Marketing ≠ Selling
Although they are closely related, marketing and selling are NOT the same thing.
Marketing includes all the efforts you engage in that cause your customer to become likely to buy from you. It includes many, many different activities, from advertising and social media posting, to special events and email newsletters. In general for a retail store, the main goal of marketing is to get the customer into your store in a frame of mind where they are eager to buy.
Selling is the person-to-person interaction where you match up your customer’s needs, wants, and desires with the perfect merchandise from your store and complete the sale.
Here’s a quick example to illustrate the point…
Imagine a women’s clothing store that decides to hold a Valentine’s Day promotion where all red, pink, purple, and white merchandise is 20% off the weekend before Valentines Day. They send a postcard to their best 100 customers about the event, email their entire customer list, post about the promotion on Facebook with pictures of the on-sale merchandise, send SMS text reminders, and create a dynamite Valentine’s Day window highlighting the sale…
All those efforts are marketing.
Now imagine that because of those efforts a customer shows up in the store eager to buy a beautiful new red, pink, or purple dress to wear on a Valentine’s date with her husband… marketing has done it’s job. She’s in the store and eager to buy.
But the job’s not over.
In the store, an employee discovers what styles the customer likes, shares expertise about fashion, fit, and fabric, and helps the customer try on different dresses until she has found the perfect one. Perhaps the employee suggests some elegant jewelry or a fantastic pair of pumps to complete the outfit. The customer feels amazing about how she looks and makes the purchase.
That’s selling!
You need them both. Marketing without great in-store selling is expensive and ineffective. Selling without great marketing is lonely since you won’t have very many customers to sell to!
