In this article, I will try simply explain the major Difference Between Marketing and Advertising. Many people think of marketing and advertising as the same thing. Although the terms marketing and advertising are sometimes used interchangeably, they have quite a few differences. Marketing is figuring out how to effectively satisfy client wants after identifying those needs. Advertising is promoting a company and its products or services through paid channels. In other words, advertising is a part of marketing. But the differences do not end there. To have a successful business, you must use both to your best advantage, so you must understand what each term involves.
What is Marketing and why it is important?
Marketing is the process of understanding the market conditions to identify customer needs and create such a product that it sells itself. According to the American Marketing Association, marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that value customers, clients, partners, and society.
Crafting your company’s marketing strategy is iterative, as the marketing landscape is constantly shifting. There are 4 essential principles—the 4 P’s of marketing—to consider when crafting your marketing strategy:
- Product: It means the goods and services that a company offers to the target market to meet the needs and desires of consumers. It is about types, quality, design, features, brand name, packaging, and services.
- Price: The amount you are asking for in sales for the product. Pricing is essential for marketing because it impacts how customers view your brand.
- Place: Where your target customers go to find information about your product.
- Promotion: How do customers find out about you? The company’s activities to communicate the product benefits, specifications, and attributes to the audience come under promotion. Their primary tools are advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, and public relations.
What Are Several Common Types of Marketing?
Traditionally, marketing efforts relied upon four different channels to connect with customers: print media, email, TV, and telephone. Businesses could engage any or all of these four channels to deliver corporate messaging and enhance branding efforts. Throughout the 20th century, the dominant marketing approach revolved around print and broadcast media combined with compelling messaging and advertising.
New messaging platforms like social media enable two-way communication between businesses and clients. From a marketing standpoint, modern technology has made it much easier to gather information on customer behaviors, needs, wants, etc.
Today, several common types of marketing include:
- Digital Marketing — Digital marketing is marketing strategies for electronic communication devices like computers or smartphones. Digital marketing strategies often leverage search engines, email, websites, blogs, and other techniques to reach customers.
- Social Media Marketing — A subset of digital marketing, social media marketing uses social platforms such as Facebook or Twitter to reach potential clients. This marketing style allows companies to take advantage of earned media from individuals outside their organization. Influencer marketing is an evolving part of social media marketing, where popular users are compensated for promoting a company’s products or services.
- Global Marketing — Some of the world’s largest companies have developed global brands between globalization and the internet. Accordingly, global marketing enables these companies to simultaneously employ a unified strategy to reach customers at the local, regional, national, and international levels.
- Relationship Marketing — Relationship marketing is a component of customer relationship management (CRM) that prioritizes long-term engagement and client loyalty over short-term objectives like customer acquisition and individual sales. Relationship marketing, also known as customer relationship marketing, aims to establish deep, even emotional relationships between a company and its customers that may result in recurring sales, unpaid word-of-mouth advertising, and customer data that might produce leads.
- Brand Management — Brand management attempts to create a bond between customers and a particular company’s brand. Evaluating a company’s products or services and its logo, design, packaging, and other elements is necessary. Brand management also assesses aspects of the target market, direct competition, and existing customer relationships.
- Product Development — Product development transforms a business opportunity into a sellable product or service. Growth can occur with existing products or new products. Successful product development involves many marketing concepts, including the identification of client needs as well as market research and analysis.
Even though it is not yet as common as the methods above, it is essential to mention societal marketing in this conversation. Also referred to as sustainable or green marketing, societal marketing goes beyond the traditional boundaries of identifying, predicting, and meeting customer needs.
Societal marketing incorporates the more significant needs of society and the world into a company’s culture, brand, and operations. Triple bottom line reporting is standard for societally focused businesses to track and measure progress. These include social and environmental impact alongside financial performance.
What Is Advertising and Why Is It Important?
The word ‘advertising ‘came from the Latin term ‘advert ‘, which simply means to turn around. It represents an organization’s means to pull people’s attention towards an object or purpose. It is a component of the marketing process.
Advertising is a part of the market communication process that a company launches to seek the public’s attention towards a particular message. Advertising is the act of purchasing a specific space to share a message with your audience regarding your product or service.
Advertising is a highly famous component of marketing. You always see advertisements on billboards as you drive home, on the radio during your commute, at the top of your Google searches, or in your Instagram feed, just to name a few.
What Are Several Common Types of Advertising?
Similar to marketing, advertising has changed vastly in the twenty-first century. The emergence of the digital age has given businesses access to various new advertising channels, including social media, search engines, and websites of all sizes. With the widespread use of smartphones, companies can reach their advertising objectives and potential clients almost anywhere.
Many businesses give any or all of the following strategies prioritization within the range of conventional advertising techniques:
- Traditional Advertising — This term refers to ad placement in traditional print and broadcast media. Common examples of conventional advertising include newspaper ads, TV commercials, and radio infomercials.
- Retail Advertising — This term refers to ads and placement within retail stores to maximize sales. Common examples of retail advertising include product placement within stores, ads on shopping carts, and featured product displays.
- Online Advertising — This term refers to ad placement in media and other websites on the internet. Examples of online advertising include contextual ads in search engines, website banners, promotional videos, and sponsored content.
- Mobile Advertising — This term refers to ad placement on mobile phones. These are various ads, for example, search ads, banner ads, call-to-action call ads, Etc.
- Outdoor Advertising — Outdoor advertising, also known as out-of-home advertising, is advertising that reaches consumers when they are outside their homes.to attract the most attention. Common examples of outdoor advertising include billboards, banners outside buildings, and branded vehicles.
- Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising — This term refers to online ad placement designed to drive traffic to a company’s website. Companies derive extensive customer data from these ads, only paying when users click the link.
Now we understand what marketing and advertising are all about, let’s dig into the difference between them.
What Is the Difference Between Marketing and Advertising?
The significant difference between these two business practices is that advertising is a marketing component. A successful marketing strategy typically allocates resources to advertising at multiple levels, distributing corporate marketing communications across multiple media types.
To dig a little deeper into this question, consider the distinctions between paid, owned, and earned media:
Paid Media – A company pays a publisher to place marketing communications in this media type. Here are the lots of Paid media: billboards, broadcast and print advertisements, search engine advertisements, social media advertisements, and direct mail or email.
Owned Media – This media type involves a company placing marketing communications through its channels. Retail merchandising, websites and business blogs, brochures, corporate social accounts, and press releases are examples of owned media.
Earned media – consists of external communications about a company from third-party actors. Online reviews, newspaper or magazine articles, social media endorsements, customer demonstrations, and other forms of external publicity are examples of earned media.
As previously stated, advertising is typically limited to paid media. The placement of messaging or branding in exchange for compensation is like advertising as a business practice. In other words, when a company advertises, it usually has a cost.
On the other hand, effective marketing strategies can impact paid, owned, and earned media. Marketing controls how a company advertises in paid media by successfully identifying customer wants and needs and evaluating the best way to meet them. Marketing also governs how a company communicates via owned media, as well as how it interacts with others via earned media.
When to use advertising vs marketing?
Though the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, marketing and advertising have some key differences. Advertising typically relies on timeliness and strategy, and it’s more focused on the aspect of brand communications. While marketing is a broader area and focuses more on longer-term processes that aim to optimize promotional efforts to see the most significant return on marketing investments. Similarly, marketing is a process for understanding consumer behavior and incorporates market research into the overall marketing strategy.