There’s a big difference between marketing and sales. But it isn’t always obvious in a small business where the same person is responsible for managing both.

Marketing comes first. It is the way you present yourself and your products to potential customers. Sales is the next step where you move from presenting to connecting.

Know your target market

It sounds obvious, but it’s worth taking time to discover exactly who your potential customers are. If you can’t define your market clearly and concisely, you’ll waste part of your marketing effort. You can’t expect to hit a bullseye if you don’t know which target you’re aiming at.

One common mistake businesses make is assuming they can sell their product or service to everyone. This is rarely true. Even the simplest and most straightforward businesses only appeal to a limited section of the population.

Suppose you run a furniture business and you want to sell online. Are you at the high-end of the market where people are looking for high quality, hand-crafted antiques of the future or are you selling low-cost mass-produced furniture?

If you’re operating at the higher level your marketing will need to reach the small, but mainly wealthy, group of traditionalists who appreciate excellence and have the money to afford it. If you’re aiming down market you’ll need to reach young families with lower incomes.

These two groups are likely to have different needs and motivations. They are also likely to use the Internet (if they use it at all) in dramatically different ways.

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One of the biggest challenges a business faces is raising prices. It’s a hurdle you must learn to overcome. Higher prices not only give you better margins and an improved bottom line, but done properly they can boost sales.

Remind yourself that even in a downturn there are waiting lists for the most expensive private schools, queues for places at posh restaurants and price-is-no-barrier auctions for upmarket property in ritzy suburbs. While it’s true that many people have no choice but to shop where things are cheap and nasty, there’s always a demand for quality too.

Here are five creative ways you can use the Internet to raise prices and boost profits:

1. Online auctions
Despite what their marketing tells consumers, people often end up paying higher prices for goods purchased through online auctions. It’s partly a matter of connecting willing buyers and sellers and partly because auction fever can bypass people’s sensible spending. Think, that mint condition Abba vinyl album sitting in your spare bedroom might get $1 at a garage sale, but online an Abba fan might bid $50 or more.

2. Shortened delivery times
Buyers want good quality products, competitive prices and they want their goods yesterday. Your competitors probably have access to the same products and wholesale prices as you do. However, if you can add value by guaranteeing quick delivery customers will pay a premium. If you can get your products to customers faster than your competitors build your web site around this virtue – www.speedyflowers.co.nz could be a hit.

3. Differentiate yourself
Physical shops do this well. Think of the difference between an upmarket city centre department store with piano players in evening dress and el cheapo discount outlets where an unshaven bloke shouts like a football caller through a low-fi high-volume sound system. You just know which shop is going to make you feel better about emptying your wallet. Hiring a creative designer and creating an online ambience that says ‘quality’ and ‘class’ can be worth as much as 20 percent in mark-up.

4. Stunning service
The best physical shops never cease to amaze customers with good service. As consumers we are trained from birth to understand that gift-wrapping, handling returns, helping with fitting and so on comes at a price. Use technology to offer your customers stunning service and they’ll keep returning.

5. Show them you’re knowledgeable
If you’re an industry authority you have extra sales power. People are happy to buy from people who know their stuff. Make sure your web site is packed with unbiased, accurate information that adds value to your sales. If possible write this material yourself or hire a writer to ghost material on your behalf.

It’s no secret that IT companies talk up their products and technologies. Let’s stop mincing words; many are hype merchants.

In fact, IT firms often go a lot further. They hire professional public relations consultants and advertising agencies to whip-up excitement on their behalf.

Sometimes they can convince people in the media to follow suit and enthuse about their new gizmos or ideas.

Occasionally the media’s constant search for hot news and interesting headlines can lead to overenthusiastic praise or a journalist gullibly swallowing a trumped-up storyline.

None of this will be news to anyone working in the business. However, what you may not know is that the IT industry’s predilection for shameless self promotion has now been formally recognised and enshrined in one of the most powerful conceptual tools for understanding IT markets: Gartner’s Hype Cycle.

About a decade ago, some Gartner analysts noticed a pattern in the way the world (and the media) viewed most new technologies. This can be summarised as a huge initial burst of excitement rapidly followed by a sigh of disillusion and, eventually, a more balanced approach.

Over time this observation evolved into the Hype Cycle, which is usually represented graphically (see diagram). Time is measured along the horizontal axis, while visibility is shown on the vertical axis.

The Hype Cycle has five distinct phases.

The first phase, Garter calls it “technology trigger”, happens when a product launch, engineering breakthrough or some other event generates an enormous amount of publicity. At first the new idea is exposed to a narrow audience, often through the specialist press, and people start thinking about its possibilities. Things snowball, before long the idea permeates to a wider audience and the mainstream media starts to pay attention.

Pretty soon this interest gets out of control until things reach the second phase, which Gartner calls “the peak of inflated expectations”. At this point the mainstream media becomes obsessed – you can expect to see muddle-headed but enthusiastic TV segments about the technology. You know things have peaked for sure when current affairs TV shows and radio presenters pay attention.

At this point people typically start to have unrealistic expectations. While there may be successful applications of the technology, there are often many more failures behind the scenes.

Once these disappointments become public, the Hype Cycle shifts into what Gartner poetically calls the “trough of disillusionment”. Most of the mainstream press will turn its back on the story, others will be critical. Sales may drop. The idea quickly falls out of favour and is tarred with the unfashionable brush.

Occasionally ideas and technologies sink beneath the waves at this point, but more often they re-emerge in the “slope of enlightenment”. This is where companies and users who persisted through the bad times come to a better understanding of the benefits on offer. As a rule of thumb, most of the media has lost interest and may even ignore things, the good stuff just happens quietly in the background.

Finally, the cycle reaches the “plateau of productivity”. This occurs when the benefits of the idea or technology are now widely understood and accepted. Things should be stable at this point. The plateau can be high or low depending on the nature of the product in question.

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• Notables in the 2008 Gartner hype cycle
• Gartner 2008 Hype Cycle

If you have a product or service to sell, it’s important that as many potential customers as possible get to hear about it. Word-of-mouth marketing is a great jumping off point when you’re starting out but eventually you’ll almost certainly need to reach a wider audience. This usually means engaging with newspapers, magazines, the Internet through web sites and blogs or broadcast media.

There are two basic ways a business can use media to get attention; advertising and publicity. Newcomers sometimes confuse the two. That’s a big mistake as they are radically different and operate in parallel universes.

Advertising is always a strictly commercial matter. Generally you buy a fixed amount of space in a printed publication or air time from a radio or TV broadcaster. Online is more complicated, but it generally comes down to display advertising like banners and boom boxes or text ads. These can appear on web sites, in electronic newsletters or even as part of an application like Gmail. When you buy advertising you provide the advertising content, or what people in the business call copy, at your expense.

If you’ve got enough budget you can hire a creative team to prepare the copy on your behalf. This costs money, in some cases a lot of money, but it can be worth it if you’re running a major campaign: clued-up advertising specialists know how to press the right buttons and get results. They can be brilliant, but this isn’t always the case.

With advertising you get to say where, when and how often the copy will run. More importantly you have complete control over the message and the way it is delivered. (Well up to a point; some publishers will refuse certain ads and there are laws about what you can and can’t say in an advertisement). Advertising prices are loosely-based on the number of readers, listeners or viewers the media delivers. Experienced buyers of advertising often think in terms of CPM or the cost of reaching one thousand people.

In contrast with advertising, you have almost no control over publicity; all the important decisions are made by editors, journalists, photographers and other media professionals. They may choose to listen to you or read your material, but they might equally ignore your input.

In principal it all depends on the newsworthiness of your message. If your story strikes a chord, they’ll take notice. If it’s boring, they’ll ignore it.

Surprising though it may sometimes seem, professional journalists have a strict ethical code. They are not for sale. Their job is to keep their readers informed about important events in their own area regardless of any external commercial considerations.

This is why you should avoid applying any kind of commercial pressure when seeking publicity. For example, don’t imply that you will place advertising with their media property in return for favourable treatment.

At best you will insult them or offend their professional pride. At worst you will create a situation where ethical considerations mean they either can’t touch your story or they choose to take a more hostile approach just to sheet home their independence.

If they take notice of your publicity, the best media operators will attempt to get behind the message you want to send. Their over-riding loyalty is to their readers. Professional journalists don’t regard aiding your sales as any part of their job. Nor should they.

This might seem confusing to some people, after media companies are usually commercial business. You might think editors and journalist would jump at the chance of making money. However, taking a longer term view makes good business sense. A media property with a strong ethical code will be held in high regard by its readers, listeners or viewers.

This not only means that more people get to consume the property’s editorial; it also means they get to see the advertising material. Significantly, a product with strong editorial will usually deliver the better, i.e. more involved or wealthier, kind of customer. At the same time, research shows advertising works best when the editorial is credible.

Even when a journalist does respond to your publicity in a largely favourable way, they still get to choose what is said, where it is said and when the story runs. They choose the angle. They also get to decide how many words to devote to your message and they can choose whether your rivals get to comment or not. An editor might choose to use your supplied photographs or other graphic material, they may not. A journalist – usually a sub-editor, will write the headline and captions.

You wouldn’t normally expect to pay money to a publisher when they use your publicity. However, there are some media properties that will ask for a payment in return for running it.

Alternatively some properties might agree to run your vetted publicity material in return for you buying advertising. In fact there’s a whole spectrum of arrangements from total separation of editorial and advertising all the way to properties that are, in effect, nothing but paid advertising.

At the extreme end of the scale you are dealing with vanity publishers – people who will take your money and make you look good. Your mother may like the result, but you won’t sell much this way.

As a general rule of thumb, publications that sell their editorial integrity are not well-regarded by their readers – that’s your prospective customers. Experienced publicity people often discount the value of these publications.

Apart from anything else, readers tend to know when they are looking at paid-for editorial and learn to trust it less than truly independent content. In particular, younger, media literate, people are especially cynical about this kind of material.

One commonly used measure is that four of their readers would be worth one reader of a more prestigious, editorially independent title. That also applies to advertising in these publications – you can expect to pay considerably less for your space in a publication that isn’t fully independent.

While many businesses organise their own publicity, others hire specialists to do it for them. The most common arrangement involves hiring a public relations or PR consultant. Amongst other things it’s their job to know which media properties and individual media professionals are receptive to which message.

A good PR company can save you a huge amount of time and trouble. They’ll help you prepare your message and train you in the art of handling the inevitable follow-up questions. They’ll make sure the message gets to the right people at the right time.

Some public relations companies have a considerable amount of intellectual property tied up with publication and journalist databases. Other operators keep all this information in their heads, Palm Pilots or Filofaxes. They cultivate contacts and learn the best way to approach each potential outlet.

Be warned that public relations companies rarely guarantee results. In fact, you should go out of your way to avoid any PR operator who makes that kind of promise.

One misconception is that publicity is all about issuing press releases or holding press conferences. Both can have an important role to play, but they are only the tip of the iceberg; most important PR takes place out of sight. We’ll look more at this later.

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This post is a reworked version of an opinion piece that appeared in New Zealand Reseller News. The original story was written in response to suggestions that New Zealand’s technology market is economically indistinguishable from Australia’s.

It’s fair to say Australian companies account for a major slice of our market. There’s no questioning the importance of trans-Tasman trade. Wisely or not, many multinationals run their New Zealand operations from Sydney. And tech support hours are often geared to Eastern Australian Time.

Yet this isn’t the whole story.

For a start, despite what many people think, our neighbour is not the single, unified market it appears to be.

Mark Twain’s experience illustrates the point perfectly. When, more than a hundred years ago, the American author travelled between Melbourne and Sydney he had to change trains at the Victoria-New South Wales border because the two colonies ran different railway gauges.

He wrote, “one or two reasons are given for this curious state of things. One is, that it represents the jealousy existing between the colonies. What the other is, I have forgotten.”

This railway gauge mess isn’t ancient history. Until 1995, Australia was the only first world country whose main cities were not linked by standard gauge railway tracks. Even now trains in different states operate on different gauges.

Another example is the confusion in on the Gold Coast when New South Wales moves onto daylight saving, but Queensland does not. Next time you’re invited to a industry knees up on the Gold Coast, try catching a flight to Brisbane and returning from Coolangatta – at certain times of the year the experience is, well, interesting.

Train tracks and time zones are the thin end of the wedge. Australia has many different regional economies, inter-state rivalries and local tribalisms. They can’t even agree on a single football code. About the only thing uniting Australians is they support one national cricket team and even then supporters disparage out-of-state players.

So while you’d be right if you thought senior executives sitting in glass tower overlooking Sydney Harbour often fail to give much thought to the wants and needs of their partners, resellers and customers in New Zealand. Remind yourself the same people also disregard business partners, resellers and customers elsewhere in Australia.

What does this mean for us? Well, curiously enough, we sometimes get a better deal than our counterparts in rural and regional Australia. Being a distinctly separate market helps. Having a different currency and tax system means they have to sit up and take more notice than they would of, say, Tasmania.

Our four million population may be tiny compared to Australia’s 20 million, but for many major IT vendors the New Zealand market is somewhere between 25 percent and 30 percent of the Australian market. That’s not to be sneezed at.

So while a vendor might be persuaded to open support lines early to accommodate New Zealanders – Perth customers don’t have a hope.

Over the long-term, companies and brands investing and hiring in New Zealand tend to punch above their weight in this market. Companies and brands who fail to invest here can expect to under-perform.

This is a simple fact of life that eludes some bean counters clicking mice over Excel spreadsheets in distant offices. Their mistake is your opportunity.