Partner Article

Whatever you do, don?t forget to sell?

Copywriter Martin Sayers looks at the importance of selling in marketing.

Last Christmas there was a lovely advert on the telly for lovely department store chain John Lewis. In it, a lovely snowman made a long and arduous journey across a cold, wintery landscape to buy a lovely hat and gloves for his
lovely snowman wife.

Lovely. But did it do the job it was supposed to do, which was to sell? I’m sure it made existing John Lewis customers feel warm and cosy about the store and look forward to doing all their Christmas shopping there, which of course they were already planning to do anyway, but did it actually bring in any new custom? Did it actually sell the John Lewis experience?

I’m not sure it did…

Compare this with the brilliant Aldi commercials that are currently running, which state – simply but with a dash of humour – that you can get much cheaper versions of all your favourite foods at Aldi. Each and every advert sells Aldi’s reason for existing very effectively and whoever devised this campaign deserves a medal from the Managing Director. I am quite sure it has brought in customers who would never have dreamed of shopping at Aldi before.

What can these two advertising campaigns teach the average business owner? It is this - if you are marketing your business, be that through an advert, a website, a sales letter or a brochure, then you have to remember to actually sell it.

That may seem like a case of stating the obvious but I have looked at far, far too many websites, flyers, sales letters and brochures – many of them professionally written – that fail to address the one burning point that all marketing literature should address. Why should you use my service above someone else’s?

This could be because you are cheaper than your competitors (like Aldi) or it could be because you have a wide range of goods and offer great customer service (like John Lewis, even if they don’t shout about it in their ads). But it has to be something - there must be something that sets you apart or you wouldn’t have a business!

Once you have identified that USP then start shouting about it and use it to actually sell your business! Hammer it home in all your marketing communications and you will soon reap the rewards in terms of increased custom and profit.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by MSCopy .