What does branding mean for your business? Are sales and marketing interchangeable terms?

In this article, we explore three revolutionary words that can make or break your business. 

It’s critical to have a clear understanding of these marketing concepts because you build your business around your knowledge. If your information pool consists of fundamental faults, how would you grow your venture? 

We’ll start with branding first. 

Branding 

Branding is all about knowing yourself precisely to understand who your customers are. Many marketers go wrong with their definition of branding. They formulate campaigns focusing on who they are and what they do. However, branding is about your consumers. 

Build a branding campaign around consumer-centric questions to increase brand credibility.

 Ask yourself: 

• How do you help your target audience?
• Why should they trust you?
• What should be the customer’s perception of your brand? 

According to a survey done by Oberlo, more than 81% of the buyers don’t purchase from a brand that they don’t trust. So, focus on improving brand authenticity. You can organize small giveaways, fan-meetups, free subscriptions, etc., to endorse yourself as a reputable brand in the market. 

Your social media posts don’t decide how good you serve your customers. Instead, the consumers who post positive comments give honest feedback about your brand that does the real magic. 

Marketing

What’s the contrast between a marketing strategy vs brand strategy? Branding helps you win the customer’s trust. But how did they know about your brand? All the communication methods that convey the message of your existence to the audience come under marketing. 

You lay all your offerings in front of your target audience through various channels. The aim is to boost brand awareness so that people become familiar with your venture. Your marketing campaign decides the number of sales you can achieve because the lesser the leads, the lesser the conversions. 

You can leverage various marketing strategies to increase your visibility. Here are a few such methods:

• Content and social media marketing
• Influencer and Conversational marketing
• Personalized and Affiliate Marketing
• Offline and word-of-mouth marketing 

As per HubSpot, around 77% of marketers agree that they have a marketing strategy. They plan on investing more in marketing because of the positive ROI. With cut-throat competition, it’s imperative to stay relevant in the market. With marketing, you can sustain your presence by effectively presenting your brand’s USPs and services.

Sales

Any business, irrespective of its size, needs money to have a meaningful existence in the market. The strategies you develop to secure clients, close-out deals and generate revenue belong to the sales vertical.

Marketing helps you generate organic traffic, which in turn gives you leads. You then nurture all the secured leads through personalized emails and other forms of engagement. Once the prospect trusts your brand, it boils down to your product and services. 

If they find what they need, they become your customer. If not, don’t lose hope and continue to generate leads because even the market giants don’t have a 100% conversion rate. 

A recent report from Spotio informs that 78% of prospects like to have Email conversations with sales representatives. 

You can win customers by: 

• Placing an impactful CTA (call-to-action)
• Through an optimized drip Email Conversion
• Via cold-calling / direct communication 

An efficient sales branding cycle ensures that newer audiences learn about your brand each day. The interested ones become your leads, and you smoothly nurture them to score conversions. 

To Conclude 

Your business outlook changes when you understand the difference between Branding, Marketing, and Sales promotion. The idea is to build a customer-centric brand so that it becomes easier to gain their attention and win their trust. 

Marketing helps you increase your reach to secure leads. Revenue generation and ROI of your business depend on the number of sales you can score. Work hard on all three aspects to formulate a competent sales cycle for your venture. 

Did we miss something? What’s your take on branding vs marketing vs advertising? Express your opinion in the comments section.