Marketing and Prospecting is two words anyone in the business world encounters a lot. People often confuse these two words or think of it as one and same, but it is not. In simple words, Prospecting is outbound marketing, and marketing is inbound marketing.
Prospecting
Prospecting is all about one-to-one marketing, finding potential clients, and reaching out to them one to one. It doesn’t matter whether the prospect you are reaching out to is interested in the service you offer or not, but the goal is to chase them down and ultimately convert them into clients. Finding out the needs of your prospects, educating them on the products, presenting your offers, and ultimately closing the deal is the aim of Prospecting. Cold calling, email spam, door-to-door marketing, etc., are some of the conventional methods used in Prospecting. The percentage of prospects that you meet turning into customers is low, and the rejections may be high, but you may still be able to acquire a small percentage of customers for your business through this process.
Marketing
On the contrary to Prospecting, marketing is all about attracting people to your business rather than chasing after leads. Marketing is all about laying out a perfect strategy to promote your brand. Many traditional marketing strategies and newer online strategies companies use for marketing include Blogging, Paid advertising, Podcasting, Promotional and educational videos, Social media engagement, email campaigns, etc. Unlike traditional marketing methods, online marketing methods prove to be more effective in reaching more people in a lesser period. Social Media platforms are the best ways to reach people in today’s world. There are also online marketing tools custom-made to match the requirement of each business. Writing blogs and articles and creating podcasts about your products or services is another way to spread information about your product to more people.
Prospecting V/S Marketing
The major difference between Prospecting and marketing is that while the former employs a one-to-one method, the latter is a one-to-many scheme. In Prospecting, you have to meet people one-on-one and explain to them about the service you offer; conversely, through marketing, people contact you to inquire about your offers and services. In Prospecting, you cannot expect the person you interact with to be interested in what you have to offer. Since marketing works in the other way and only people who care about your business will spare the time to contact you, the number of prospects becoming customers are higher. In Prospecting, the number of people you can contact is limited. Inbound methods, especially online marketing methods, expand your market and promote your product to a much wider audience.
What’s Good for your Business?
If you are new to the business world, taking the risk of one marketing method is not recommended. It would be best if you used both the marketing strategies until you have a firm stand. Once you are established and gained a name for your brand, you can move to the “less input and more output” inbound marketing strategy. You can also assess the outcome and situation of your business to make a switch to either of the methods as required.