If you are new to the digital advertising landscape, you might have noticed that the terms “marketing” and “advertising” seem to be used interchangeably. At first glance, marketing and advertising do appear to be synonymous. Two terms that can be used interchangeably to describe methods that help you sell more goods or services.

However, there are big differences between the two, and being able to distinguish between the two will help you build a more comprehensive, effective approach to achieving your business goals, which will ultimately affect your bottom line. 

What is marketing?

Marketing is all practices carried out by a business to market and sell goods or services to customers. Marketing uses the “marketing mix,” also known as the four Ps — product, pricing, placement, and promotion. Essentially, the purpose of marketing is to obtain a certain product or service, define its ideal consumers, and attract the customer’s attention to the available product or service.

Developing a marketing strategy requires a lot of time and preparation, planning your product for the marketplace, and starting to create a unique selling proposition (USP) that differentiates your company from your competitors. This idea can be used as a guide or mission statement to help you develop a marketing plan. You need to consider who your future customers are and what they might expect from your goods or services. When you understand what consumers think and behave, you will position yourself as a brand and build content that you can talk to.

Colors, logos, and other design elements must suit the tastes of the target audience. Market research provides you with data to support your marketing activities. It lets you know when and where to place your ads, helps you gain market share, and provides insight into the best formats (such as image, copy, video) to use in your ads.

To conduct a successful promotion, you must conduct good market research. Market research helps to identify target audience and increases the likelihood of successfully acquiring new customers. Through market analysis, you can not only evaluate the demand for your goods or services, but also evaluate future competition and sales models. Marketing companies focus on advertising campaigns, tracking consumer behavior through various channels, including surveys and questionnaires, tracking online activity, and even face-to-face interviews with consumers.

The strategy of marketing often includes four main segments, which are also referred to as the 4 P’s: product, placement, price and promotion.

• Product: The first P, Product, refers to all goods and services that business brings to the market in order to satisfy customer demand. It can involve emerging or unsatisfied needs on the market.
• Price: Setting the right price is critical for the success of a product and the business as a whole. There are several considerations involved in determining prices, including profit margins, perceived value of the product, and potential costs of not purchasing the product.
• Placement: Placement is how the product is supplied to the end consumer. Placement includes the analysis and execution of distribution, franchise and exclusive delivery. Place can also indicate retail channels, such as brick and mortar vs. e-commerce, or online distribution sites.
• Promotion: All vehicles of communication used by a brand to relay the message about its products and services fall under this phase of marketing, or where advertising lives.

What is advertising?

Advertising is an effort to attract the attention of the public, especially through paid advertisements to attract the attention of the company’s products or services.

Advertising is a part of a larger marketing plan, and its role is to properly advertise a company’s goods or services. This will increase interest in target consumers, build purchasing power and ultimately help the overall marketing strategy to convert sales. When you understand who your target audience is and how to better communicate with them, your marketing plan will include a strategy to better position yourself in the market.

Although through marketing you can convince potential customers that you have a product that suits them, through advertising you prove that the product exists and influence the purchasing behaviour. Advertising must be timely and strategic, and emphasize creative marketing and publicity.

Communicating with future consumers in the right way means talking to them in different ways depending on the purchasing process they are in. Consumer’s purchase behavior is divided into four stages (awareness, desire, consideration and purchase), which can be categorized into three groups (cognitive, affective and Conative).

Your promotional plan will help you illustrate, educate and promote your product to the right audience through a variety of means during these stages.

• Cognitive (awareness and knowledge): At this stage, your target customers are processing the information that comes from advertising communication. Advertising should provide information about the benefits of the product to create interest.
• Affective (liking and preference): When consumers get to the affective stage, they want to feel connected to the brand. Advertising should be relevant to the audience so that it can create emotional connections.
• Conative (conviction and purchase): At this point, consumers are either showing intent to buy or actually buying. At this point, advertisement is becoming a means of accelerating the buying cycle.

Marketing vs. Advertising: What are the differences?

There are several differences between marketing and advertising. Marketing is a process that involves many elements, such as development, analysis, design, planning and data mining. All of this is to understand how the company can better match the product or service concept with the brand’s target market.

Advertising is the actual way to make the target market (and the public) aware of a branded product or service. Advertising can be seen as a tool used by a brand to showcase products or services to the public.

Advertising usually includes promotional advertisements, and creative advertisements can be used to increase product visibility. Advertising typically has time limits, and marketers can use different advertising techniques to achieve their desired results.

Marketing can use different advertising techniques to achieve the results they want. Companies in the new digital market need to develop marketing strategies in order to introduce products or services to the world. Advertising is only a part of a marketing strategy.

The difference is that advertisement is a part of the big marketing plan. Some marketing elements that work with advertising include media planning, market analysis, public relations, delivery, sales management, pricing, and more.

Therefore, Advertising can convey information about products, services or brands. Marketing requires necessary market research and analysis so that marketers can make informed decisions, and marketing almost always involves advertising.

Marketing vs. Advertising: What are the similarities?

Despite the differences, there are still some similarities between advertising and marketing. Marketing requires a lot of research and practice to understand how to use media channels to convey information about the brand to market

They work together to achieve the same goal (to release and sell products or services). Marketing can include issues like customer behavior and market analysis. Advertising also requires more innovative processes, such as design and media partnerships. They work together to create a brand image and sell products.

What does this all mean to you as a business?

In order to stand out in an oversaturated competitive market, companies need to formulate marketing strategies (Overall strategic plan to deliver products or services to the market. Advertising is a part of that big marketing strategy.

Some aspects include market analysis, media preparation, public relations, brand and product creation, delivery, positioning and segmentation, customer service, sales strategy and pricing. All of this requires a budget, and advertising is almost always the highest cost of any marketing campaign.

Advertising must be combined with the other parts of the overall marketing plan to convert the entire efforts into sales, and a well-designed ad campaign needs to be conducted on multiple platforms with high frequency to achieve the desired results.

It is important to understand the difference between marketing and advertising and how they work together to understand that allocating a different budget to each will make the product successfully marketed.

Summary

So, when it comes to marketing vs. advertising, which one brings you revenues? The exact answer is not all of them! Marketing and advertising have a close symbiotic relationship. A good marketing strategy requires well-researched and well-executed advertising across channels and media. Without a strong marketing strategy, the best advertising campaigns in the world will not be able to achieve their full potential