What Is The Difference Between Advertising And Marketing?
Current technological advancements have made it possible for businesses to use diverse marketing and advertising strategies to reach more potential customers and make sales. Everybody seems to be shifting from the traditional forms of marketing to digital marketing and social media advertising.
Although these words are sometimes used interchangeably, there are several unique differences between advertising and marketing. Whether you are an entrepreneur looking to make your brand popular among potential customers, or a marketer looking to build a large customer base and close more sales, you have to be aware of these differences and the purposes of advertising. Continue reading to learn more about advertising and marketing, and the differences that exist between them.
What Is Marketing?
Marketing involves designing, creating, researching, and mining data that will help you understand the best ways to align your product or service with your target market. Through marketing, you are able to define your product or service even better than you can do with the actual product or service.
The marketing process also involves identifying, predicting, and meeting your customer’s needs. Once you understand what your target customers need, you can easily come up with effective strategies that will help you serve your customers even better, while maximizing revenue. However, it’s important to understand that there are two main types of marketing: business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing and business-to-business (B2B) marketing.
So, as you come up with your business’s marketing strategies, you’ll need to know which type of marketing you are planning and who you are targeting. In B2C marketing, you will be targeting the end consumers of your product or service, while in B2B you will be targeting other businesses. However, there are several important factors that you need to consider when creating a marketing strategy for both. These factors include:
Orientation – this refers to the guiding principles of your business, commonly referred to as the business philosophy or corporate culture. In most cases, companies orient around products, sales, production, or marketing.
Mix – the mix serves as your company’s decision-making guide for its marketing campaigns. The best marketing mix should focus on client/customer relations, convenience, cost, and communication.
Environment – The environment you plan to market in can influence your company’s ability to execute its marketing strategy and decision-making process. That’s why you have to consider the environment in your company, as well as the external factors like macro and micro environments when planning your campaigns.
Market – this refers to your target market. You have to consider the traits of your ideal clients. This requires extensive research and segmentation in order to isolate the geographic and demographic factors that can help market and sell your products or services.
Once you have carefully analyzed your orientation, mix, environment, and target market, you can easily assess the cost and benefits of different marketing methods and approaches. This is an important part of the planning process because there are many ways of marketing your business.
What Is Advertising?
Advertising is the process of making your product or service known to your target audience. It refers to the actual message you create to present your product or service to them. This includes advertising campaigns in both traditional and digital media channels. The idea here is to take advantage of the creative positioning within each channel, and craft your advertising to its native properties..
Unlike other forms of marketing, advertising is a one-way channel of communication, allowing you to broadcast a non-personal message to the world. This means that you have total control over what you tell the world about your product or service. For your advertising campaigns to be effective, they must be timey, engaging, and memorable.
It is also important to note that when you pay a certain media house or social media influencer to market your brand, you are free to order the advertiser to package the message the way you prefer. What’s the importance of advertising? The benefits of advertising your business include:
Educating your customers on the nature of your products or services
Convincing customers that your products or services are superior
Improving customer perception of your brand or culture
Generating customer desire to have your products or services
Exhibiting new applications for your products or services
Publicizing your new products or services to potential customers
Attracting new customers to buy your products or services
Retaining the existing customer base
Types Of Advertising
For you to succeed in business, you have to engage in one or several of the common types of advertising. Here are the main types of advertising.
Traditional advertising – this type of advertising involves ad placement in traditional print and broadcast media, including newspaper ads, radio infomercials, and TV commercials.
Retail advertising – this type of advertising involves the placement of ads in retail stores to increase sales. For instance, you can place adverts on shopping carts, shelves, and other parts of the store.
Online Advertising – this refers to the use of different platforms on the internet to advertise your product or service. The most common types of online advertising include contextual adverts in search engines, website banners, promotional videos, and sponsored content.
Mobile advertising – this type of advertising involves the placement of adverts on smartphones. Common examples of mobile advertising include automated banners, click-to-call ads, and dialers. It is also common to now see ads regularly appearing on mobile apps.
Outdoor advertising – this is the placement of ads on outdoor structures, especially on busy roads, outside popular malls, and other public places. Outdoor adverts can include billboards, banners, and branded vehicles.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising – this is another type of online advertising that helps to drive traffic to your company’s website. It involves enticing your target customers to click on a link that takes them to your website.
In summary, marketing is a more controlled and far-reaching process of making your brand known to potential customers, while advertising is an avenue to communicate about your brand, but it is often one-sided. In other words, marketing requires both research and execution, while advertising requires execution only, since you’ll have done the research for all your advertising, when you undertook your marketing research.