Building Sales vs. Building a Brand

Building Sales vs. Building a Brand

Sooner or later, every business finds itself poised for growth.

But which is more important: building sales or building a brand?

All right, so you’ve established your business. The lease has been signed. The employees have been hired. You even have a website. Now what?

If you’re like most business owners, you’re probably most concerned with how to get paying customers through the door.

The problem? There are a lot of different ways to make that happen. And most people only focus on a few of them. As a result, they spend a lot of time spinning their wheels and not enough time depositing money into the bank.

In this article, we’ll go over two methods that business owners can use to take things to the next level and how you can use both of them to get the most out of your marketing budget.


graphic of megaphone

Building Sales

Ahh…good old advertising! The classic strategy that most people think of when they think of “marketing.”

This includes things like:

  • TV, radio, and internet ads
  • Billboards
  • Mailers
  • Swag with your logo on it
  • Sign twirlers


You get the idea.

The exact methods used can vary, but the concept is the same: you invest money on getting in front of people’s eyeballs and, in turn, they become customers. At the end of the day, if you took in more money than you paid out, the strategy is usually deemed a success.

graphic of award ribbon

Building a Brand

If building sales has been your only strategy so far, you might be surprised that there are any other ways to build a business.

Which means you’re about to learn a secret that marketers like us have known for a long time. Ready for it?

It’s called: building a brand.

Instead of directly focusing on trading dollars for eyeballs, you’re simply building yourself into the best “you” you can be.

Sort of a “build-it-and-they-will-come” approach.

This usually includes things like:

  • Engaging text on your website
  • Blog posts
  • Professional-quality videos
  • Podcasts


The idea behind building a brand is to position yourself, not as the answer to everyone’s problems, but as an expert in your chosen industry. If you can do that, they will convince themselves that you’re the answer to their problem.

Contrary to the building sales method, you won’t know if it works right away, so you’ll need to have a lot of patience.

graphic of gears and stack of coins

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Building Sales vs. Building a Brand

If you’ve been following us for any amount of time, this will come as no surprise, but there is a time and a place for both.

When you’re first starting out as a brand-new baby business, you won’t have the reputation that building a brand gives you over time. Therefore, building sales through direct paid advertising is a must.

But here’s where it starts to fall apart:

When you’re spending money every time you want to make money, you’re going to get exhausted (and broke). The most successful businesses are money machines. They keep dollars coming in whether you want them to or not.

Other than referrals from satisfied customers (which is great!), building sales doesn’t work on its own.

In other words: what you have is a kitchen, where you’re responsible for doing the work every day to keep people fed.

What you want is a food truck; one where you can set up shop and have people line up around the block.

Building your brand is like getting a pimped out food truck. While you’re driving around town, taking care of business, people are taking notice. They see the sharp logo. They see the line that’s 100-strong. They smell the tacos.

That’s what keeps them coming back.

Conclusion

Here at Clarity, we make it our mission to grow businesses, not just “increase sales.”

While there is always a time and a place for paid advertising, our belief is that it should be accompanied with brand building that keeps your eye on the horizon.

This approach hasn’t just worked wonders for our clients, we’ve seen it work with our own business, too.

Since we moved into our first office in 2016, we haven’t purchased any ads, billboards, or fliers. We’ve worked diligently on a referral network, refining our processes, and an ethos of honesty, transparency, and accountability.

And the clients keep coming.

If you’re excited about what the future holds for your business and willing to do what it takes to get there, reach out to us on our website, social media, or over the phone. We’ll use our marketing sauce to build custom strategies to build a brand that (ultimately) builds more sales.

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