Sales is all about bringing in leads and converting them into dollars. It’s about finding people with a problem and helping them solve it!
And marketing is an essential piece of your overall sales puzzle. That’s not to say that marketing is useless without sales—absolutely not!
Marketing is all up in your business when it comes to branding, lead generation, your messaging, how your audience finds you (and vice versa), and so much more… but today, we’re not going down that rabbit hole.
Today, we’re talking about the space where marketing meets sales. They’re two very different disciplines, but they are both essential for the success of your business.
In regards to sales, marketing definitely has a huge impact on things like your conversion rates, the number of leads in your pipeline, how well you convert those leads, how good of a fit those potential clients are, even how aware and ready to buy that your audience is.
But marketing influencing sales is probably not as direct as you think.
In fact, people who start marketing for their business (either by doing it themselves or by investing in an agency, a marketer, or a social media manager) thinking it’s going to massively explode their sales right away are dead wrong.
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Hard Truths about Marketing (That No One Likes to Hear)
Marketing is a long game. There is no quick fix, no secret sauce, no overnight success. We experts in the field often have our “secrets,” but even we will say that increasing your revenue quickly is a great goal that we work hard toward, but doing so overnight is irregular.
Not impossible. Viral success does happen. But it is highly irregular.
Marketing is about consistent, strategic action and aligned messaging to the right people over a period of time.
Hard Truth #1: There is no secret sauce to quick success.
There is no secret sauce.
Generally speaking, I tell my clients and students to expect to start to see progress in the first 30 days, things picking up speed in 60 days, and measurable goal-hitting results in about 90 days.
But while you may have to wait to start seeing results if you’re starting from zero, there is no bad time to start marketing better. There is no bad time to kickstart a new campaign or really hone in on brand awareness and community building.
What’s better, marketing has a cumulative effect. If you keep at it and you keep refining your strategy and consistently showing up, you’ll see the results compound over time, meaning better results with less effort as you go.
When it comes to influencing sales, we have to think of this as something that happens over time and stop believing that one email sequence or one series of “launch” posts on Instagram will vault you into success.
Hard Truth #2: You have to have a website even if you focus on social media marketing.
If you’re using social media as a connector (and you absolutely should), you have to have a website. Social media is for connecting. Your website is for converting. So, yes, it’s a mandatory thing.
The people telling you it isn’t are recommending you swim upstream, and I just can’t get on board with that.
Here’s the thing, you don’t own your social presence or your audience there, and only a very small percent of people on social media will see your content at any given time.
By using social media as a tool rather than the home of your platform, you can create a much better conversion system for your audience, because as much as we’d love to think it, people don’t generally buy straight from social media.
Especially for coaching and services.
The key is to seamlessly marry your marketing to your sales process and lead your audience on a journey with you.
Hard Truth #3: Not marketing in today’s crowded online space is not an option.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an ad promising that someone can grow their business to 6 or 7 figures without ever posting on social media or sending emails.
Yet, they’ll tell you to network on LinkedIn or start a Facebook Group. Well, guess what? That’s marketing!
At its most basic, marketing is the process of showing up online, getting visible, and essentially letting people know you exist and how to buy your thing that should help them solve their problem.
Every single business needs to be marketing. I love using social media to build a community and then moving my social audience into my email list so I have a bit more ownership and control over my relationship with them.
And going back to the overarching theme of this post, that’s what I mean by marketing being so influential to your sales but not as directly as you think.
Because getting someone’s attention on social media, engaging with them there, continuing that relationship through email marketing, leading them to a conversion event, and then selling to them at that event is not a simple A to B process.
It’s not as simple as posting a picture of a product on Instagram that they can click over to buy.
Instead, it’s about building a relationship, a real, true, authentic relationship with someone. It’s about getting to know them and speaking to their needs and their fears and their desires.
Those who master the relationship and the human connection stand out in today’s online space and will continue to do so no matter what the algorithms do.
Marketing builds trust, establishes that you’re an authority, and overcomes objections before you ever get on a sales call with someone.
Because even if they never interact with you on social media, you can be sure they’re watching you.
And that’s kind of the whole thing about marketing and its affect on sales. There’s a lot that happens inside the person on the other end of your post that we don’t really see.
There’s a lot that we can tie to specific metrics… how many referral clicks came from social media? How well did our Facebook ads convert?
But there is a lot that’s more indirect. When it comes to relationships you’re nurturing for future partnerships, or referrals that might come down the road, or even brand awareness.
So, marketing has a huge affect on your sales, but it’s not always in direct consumer-clicks-button-and-buys-product way you might think.
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