All businesses will develop a strategy that helps them promote their business and find new customers. A core part of this strategy will revolve around how you market your company. What tactics will you use, who are you targeting, and so on? Advertising also plays a significant role, but there’s often a lot of confusion surrounding both of these. Some people believe that advertising and marketing are the same things, but they aren’t.
As someone that’s looking to promote their business, you need to understand what both of these terms mean and how they differ.
Understanding Marketing
Marketing is the process of looking at your company and figuring out how best to promote it to your desired audience. It involves identifying the target customer, creating customer personas, then building a strategy that’s meant to meet the needs of the customer.
From here, you will start to implement different marketing tactics to reach your target audience and grow your brand image. Marketing encompasses many different things and has many types. Some of the most well-known are:
- Social media marketing
- Digital marketing
- Global marketing
- Relationship marketing
Brand development is also part of a marketing strategy as you figure out how you want your brand to be perceived, which influences all of your marketing material.
Understanding Advertising
By contrast, advertising is where you pay to promote your business. You’ve got lots of different forms of advertising to consider:
- Print advertising
- Billboard advertising
- TV advertising
- Online advertising
- PPC advertising
- Mobile advertising
The list goes on, but all of these things have one thing in common: you create an advert for the desired platform, then pay to have it presented. The aim is to grab the attention of your audience, reeling them in and making them interested in what you’re promoting.
With this in mind, we can say that advertising is actually a form of outbound marketing. This is because the whole aim is to push your message and brand out there as far as you can, trying to grab people’s attention.
How Do Advertising & Marketing Differ?
After understanding the basics of both, how can we say that marketing and advertising differ from one another?
Primarily, the key difference is that advertising is part of marketing, while marketing can stand on its own. In theory, you can run an entire marketing campaign without paying for any advertising. It can all be done inbound using things like SEO, social media, etc. However, you couldn’t really run an advertising campaign without marketing. Why? Because you need marketing to help you identify your target audience and how best to reach them. This information helps you develop a suitable advert and figure out the best place to broadcast it.
In conclusion, marketing and advertising are two different things. Marketing is the act of planning and identifying how to promote your business to the right audience, developing the most effective strategy. Advertising might form part of this strategy, but it’s all to do with paying to promote adverts for your business. The two can exist separately, but they work best when used together.
