Marketing vs Advertising Key Differences You Need to Know
When you hear the words “marketing” and “advertising”, do you think they are the same? Some people use these terms interchangeably, referring to marketing as advertising and vice versa. But in truth these two concepts are very different. It’s related, but different.
As a marketer, it’s important to know the difference. In addition to clarifying the differences in your mind, this knowledge will also be useful when you talk to customers or transfer managers, who may think that the two separate words mean the same thing.
By being able to explain what marketing is and how it differs from advertising, you can create an effective conversation about the topic. The more everyone understands the difference between advertising and marketing, the more relevant and effective your meetings and events will be. Let’s start with some explanations.
What is Marketing?
Marketing is an ongoing process of making your product or service attractive to the market and potential customers. Segmenting, acquiring, and retaining customers in a competitive market is a difficult challenge. Therefore, marketing is a very difficult process.
Marketing basically starts with informing and understanding your audience about your brand and your products. The market cultivates leads in both online and offline marketing campaigns until it acquires paying customers. So, good marketing is about providing training and support after the sale.
Look at it this way, and you’ll see that marketing is a much broader concept than advertising. In fact, you might say that advertising is a part of marketing and one of the most important strategies (if not the most important) in marketing.
After all, advertising (as we will see later) has many different functions that support the main purpose of marketing, that is to make your business more visible and attractive in the eyes of customers , thus increasing your income.
But before you think about doing anything in advertising, you should cover a lot of marketing activities such as branding, market research, positioning, pricing, etc.
Because marketing is the broader term, it may point to some of the most fundamental aspects of building and growing a business. Enter the “marketing mix”, first coined by Neil Borden, a world renowned Harvard professor in marketing and advertising. According to Borden, the marketing mix is a decision making matrix for making marketing decisions in any business.
At first, the marketing mix was divided into the 4Ps
- Product: The service or the product that your business offers that addresses the specific needs and desires of your ideal customers.
- Price: How much money customers will pay your business in order to receive your product or service. Price also helps dictate how profitable your business will be.
- Place: Where and how your customers are able to find and access your products and services, including retail or resellers, distribution, franchising, and others.
- Promotion: How your business communicates the benefits and uses of your product or service. This is where advertising comes in.
Through the years, however, the 4Ps have expanded to the 7Ps, including more parameters that are particularly relevant for those businesses that provide services and not just products.
- People: Who provides the service of your business. Every business needs to rely on qualified, competent people to deliver services to their customers.
- Process: The standard operating procedure that your people follow to show customers exactly what they receive when they purchase your service.
- Physical evidence: What tangible benefit your customers receive as part of your service. For instance, if you are an advertising agency, the physical evidence might be the results your campaigns provide to your clients’ sales numbers.
What is Advertising?
Now let’s focus on advertising. As mentioned earlier, advertising can be considered a part of marketing because all of your advertising campaigns (including native ads, social media, search ads, YouTube ads, CTV ads, etc. to podcast ads) support all of your marketing goals.
This means that trades are expensive. For example, while organic social media is a form of advertising, traditional advertising is the cost of placing an ad, whether on television, newspapers, or more commonly, online. Advertising is used in many ways: to create a brand image, to promote a product or product range, to promote sales or discount offers. The biggest advantage of digital advertising is the ability to track ads and conversions, collect customer data, and use it to create and optimize future campaigns.
Some other purposes of advertising include
- Brand building to boost your business’s reputation.
- Making customers aware that they have unmet needs and desires that your business can provide.
- Lead generation to build the customer pipeline.
- Reaching relevant audiences using social media posts.
- Highlighting your product or service benefits with storytelling tactics.
If marketing communicates the bigger picture of the brand’s identity and message, advertising is the tool to actually get it in front of customers. Many creative activities make up the process of advertising, such as conceptual development, writing copy, creating visuals and videos, and more.
Key Differences Between Marketing and Advertising
Key Differences between marketing and advertising. Now that we know what marketing and advertising are and how they relate to each other, let’s explore six key differences between the two.
Responsibility
Because the goal of marketing is to increase the visibility and attractiveness of the business to potential and existing customers, marketing has the following responsibilities
Brand Your brand is your image in the market; it is ultimately the way you behave, communicate and invite potential customers to your business that sets you apart from other companies in the same field. Your brand will stay in the minds of customers forever.
Trend monitoring and competitive monitoring The marketing team needs to know where your brand is in comparison to current competitors, as well as understand market trends. They pay close attention to what the competition is doing, hot topics in the industry, and what customers are saying about them and their competition.
Customer relationship management marketing teams can use surveys and interviews, as well as other feedback collection tools and activities, to determine if the business is meeting customer expectations.
What our customers say
Organize across departments
Your marketing team is not the only thing in your business. With multiple departments working together to keep your business running smoothly, your marketing team must ensure that all departments understand and support your marketing, branding, and goals
Market Research and Strategy Development
The main responsibility of the marketing team is to ensure that the business is in good shape. They need to know what’s hot in the market, know effective marketing tools and strategies, and manage the latest software and programs to help the business run better and support other operations. , such as account management and after sales support.
Budget Tracking and ROI (return on investment)
The marketing team ensures that they don’t overspend. Based on annual data, the team plans the marketing budget and ensures that all marketing activities stay within budget. They do everything and understand their required ROI to ensure that the marketing investment is profitable.
Purpose
Although the ultimate goal of marketing and advertising is to increase sales and profits, the means by which these goals are achieved are often different. The following are the goals and objectives of marketing and advertising
Marketing
- Lead generation
- New customer acquisition
- Customer retention
- Maintaining consistent branding
- Managing and creating upsell and cross sell opportunities
- Product development
- Tracking the results of all marketing initiatives as a whole
Advertising
- Building brand awareness
- Boosting brand recognition
- Attracting first time buyers to purchase
- Informing or reminding customers about the existence of your brand
- Compelling customers to purchase through ads
- Increasing brand loyalty
- Keeping the brand’s image strong
- Establishing the business as the top of mind option among others in the market
- Motivating existing customers to make repeat purchases
Applied technology
Since marketing and advertising have different goals, it’s not surprising that they use different methods to achieve those goals. Inbound Marketing Use organic strategies to attract customers to your business. Below is an example of an inbound marketing blog post on the Outbrain blog that teaches affiliate marketers about the best affiliate programs when they bring leads to the Outbrain website.
Content Marketing Content marketing uses all types of content (landing pages, blogs, social media, YouTube videos, etc.) to engage an online audience and generate interest in a business or brand
Search Engine Optimization by ranking your business higher on Google, you can get more visibility and drive traffic to your website. Email Marketing your business can stay in touch with customers through email campaigns, advertisements and promotions.
Traditional media such as print, television or radio Marketing ads such as billboards and in store promotions. Digital Advertising, such as social media advertising, video marketing, content aggregation, guest posting, etc.
Native ads promote ads that match the look and feel of the web page they appear on. This makes ads less boring to viewers and therefore more engaging. Mobile ads in apps
Investment is required
With the exception of organic social media advertising, most forms of advertising require funding, making advertising one of the more expensive marketing campaigns your company will spend.
These costs also depend on who you work with to implement your advertising program, including suppliers and contractors as well as agencies that work with you to create, plan and report on their projects. If you plan to use in house talent for advertising, you may want to create a team that includes advertisers, copywriters, video editors, and more.
After all, the biggest investment in advertising is your spending money. Each advertising platform, from television, Maori media, to social media, has its own costs for advertising on its platform.
Because marketing involves other factors such as branding and customer research and trends, all marketing costs may include the various positions and tools necessary to support those marketing goals. For example, hire a product manager, brand manager, sales manager, or research analyst who can ensure that all marketing activities are handled for your business.
If your business is considering a new brand in the future, a large portion of your marketing budget should go to new brand research and development, as well as ongoing costs to ensure the market understands your repair work.
Marketing investments may include various software and hardware to support other marketing activities. This may include an email marketing provider, marketing automation platform, or research company to conduct customer research and reporting.
Measure success
When it comes to marketing and advertising, you need to be consistent with your business and ensure that your strategies are successful. By optimizing and implementing successful marketing campaigns and eliminating strategies that don’t resonate with your target audience, you can keep your marketing and promotional investment profitable and ensure that you get the most out of it. your business can.
Marketing
- Net Promoter Score
- Customer Retention
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Quarterly and Annual Sales Revenue
- Market Share
Advertising
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
- Reach and Impressions
- Click-through Rates (CTR)
- Engagement
- Conversion Rates
Results
Looking at how long each project will take to generate results for your business. Remember, advertising is part of marketing, so the goal of advertising is to get faster results and results for your brand, marketing campaigns are created for the long term and build your brand for the day ahead.
For campaigns, you need to consider the length of the campaign to monitor results. For example, if you run a campaign for a month, you want to see the results after that month. You can also check in after a few months to see if this is happening long term. At the same time, when it comes to marketing, you should think of it as a lifelong process. Your business and brand will grow with your customers and market trends. However, it’s important to monitor the performance of your marketing campaigns over time to understand the health of your brand, what content resonates with your audience, and where it’s headed.