Marketing, shmarketing. Who needs it?

Everything starts with a sale. Marketing does not equal sales, or vice versa. Yet, smaller organizations frequently get along fine without a formal marketing function - for a time. Many companies view the sometimes complex functions of marketing as a cost-of-sales, rather than a driver of sales. They wait too long before seriously considering an investment in marketing. Marketing is best implemented before the first dark clouds appear on the sales and profit horizon. With marketing in place, businesses can even circumvent sales and profit-zapping issues as they crop up, and new challenges arise.

Every sales professional knows instinctively what it takes to prospect for leads, right?
Yes, and no. The vigilant sales person:

1) sows the seeds for sales throughout a network that extends to industry groups, peers and acquaintances;
2) is in personal touch with customers to short circuit any customer service issues while probing for new ways to add customer value.
3) provides market intelligence for future product or service development.
4) cannot consistently deliver the same message to every customer all of the time.

Sales is king, but even a king needs support
The need for improved sales and profitability - the multiplication of sales - manifests itself when existing sales processes need a marketing kick, i.e. help that goes beyond one-on-one selling, especially as sales goals change.

Marketing is the multiplication of sales efforts, and comes into play before, during and after a sale. More than simple one-shot-wonder promotions and advertising, marketing orchestrates many tools to help develop and maintain customer dialog - and profitability.

Marketing:

1) softens the field for sales.
2) gets prospects to raise their hands for a sales contact.
3) Perhaps most importantly, marketing helps convey a company's brand to knock down barriers to a sale, lift customer expectations for doing business with a company, creating a preference in the market for a company's goods or services.

Send in the clowns
Prospecting, networking, customer support, and all aspects of customer development that lead to long term customer value is a continuum to be broken at great risk to sales and profits.

Marketing, the anecdote
Marketing is comprised of the strategy, tactics, and the creative implementation of a plan to ensure: fresh sales leads, timely customer communications, non-stop customer service, and continuous development of relevant product and services leading to improved sales, market share, and profitability. Coordinated advertising, PR, website, and other media campaigns create value in a customer's mind. With these tools savvy marketers are able to rise above their competition with better profit margins.

Elevator Pitch EJW Associates Inc

INTRO: Hello, my name is Emil Walcek, President and founder of EJW Associates Inc

Make it fast, I'm only going to the 7th floor...

EJW Associates Inc is a creative marketing services agency. We cater to small to medium sized businesses with a combination of creative boutique agency services involving marketing, websites, design, and content.

Our clients will describe us as a valued team member that helps them do the right marketing things in the right ways to effectively support sales.

We were founded in 1982 to help business-to-business marketers get the best possible sales return on their marketing dollar. Businesses selling to other businesses have historically been under-served by independent marketing services firms. 

Keep talking, I'm getting off at the 25th floor...

Typical EJW services - sold on a contract or project basis - include: advertising, PR, all things-website (including search optimizing, search marketing, hosting), direct marketing, print and digital graphic design/content.

We've been busily providing marketing services since 1982 - a very long life in our industry. We've been around so long largely because we are effective. Our projects result in more and better sales returns for our clients.

We are both professional and flexible in our work. Sometimes we augment a client's internal resources on select projects. Other times the EJW team functions as a company's de facto marketing department when management is running lean and mean.

Even though technology has made it better, faster, and easier for almost anyone with a tool or two to do almost any marketing project, that doesn't mean it'll come out right, or that it is the right thing to do in the first place!

With EJW services, clients typically receive better results for less than from any other marketing resource, including (if they have one) an overworked staff in-house.

CLOSE: Businesses selling to other businesses have historically been under-served by independent marketing services firms. Happy or not with your present marketing, I think we could probably both benefit from a no-pressure/no-obligation followup review. Call me at 770-664-9322, or email advertise@ejwassoc.com