What is the difference between marketing and advertising?  

Marketing is the way your business communicates value as a whole.  Everything from how a receptionist answers the phone to your most aggressive sales call-to-action falls under the umbrella of marketing.  It’s your brand image, informational material, story, public relations, product descriptions, guarantees, billing structure, customer-service, new client intake process – and your advertising.

The reason this question is so confusing is that advertising is both a part of – yet different from – marketing.  The disciplines overlap, causing most of us to use the terms interchangeably.  But with online marketing strategy, they must be treated differently.

Advertising is a part of marketing with a vital role.  It’s the direct-response content that communicates to your target audience when they are closest to making a buying decision.  It’s ad copy, sales call scripts, landing page content, calls-to-action, and your sales conversion metrics.

To clarify, let’s look at the three main phases of development that make-up marketing and advertising in the digital space.

Marketing Research  

Marketing research is where you determine if your business idea is viable.  You analyze if you have a solution to a real problem, and if there are people who will pay you for it.

We can make a distinction here.  You do marketing research without a product.  But you don’t advertise without a product.  The advertising message is only needed when you have something to sell.

This means that it’s a mistake it to start an advertising campaign when you don’t even know if there is a target segment that needs what you offer.

Yet many businesses, confused about the difference between advertising and marketing, make this mistake.  They think their marketing and advertising will manufacture the need in people.  This rarely works in today’s digital world.

Instead, marketing research discovers a need and develops a solution.  In some cases, the product engenders the needs, like Apple did with the iPhone.  But in most cases (particularly in the SMB space) marketing research seeks and uncovers a need that’s not being met and develop a unique solution.

You many pattern match an existing product idea, then seek to beat out the competition through aggressive promotion.  Or you may create a new value innovation, which means you need marketing to create awareness of your solution and advertising to sell it.

Understanding your customer’s needs and values is key to marketing research.  Remember that only when you get to the point that people understand they have the need will advertising be effective.

Marketing Concept, Story, and Branding

When you realize you have a viable product idea, you can start to develop your marketing concept.  This includes the ways you’ll tell your business story, which triggers emotions in your audience, and develop your brand, which is how you become recognized based on images and slogans rather than explanations.

Your marketing concept includes your mission statement, customer service policies, reputation management and the communicative structure of your organization.  In every way these touch prospects or clients, they are part of a marketing message.

Maybe you have crews you want wearing uniforms.  That’s marketing.  Or you have a catchphrase staff uses when someone walks in your door.  That’s marketing.

The color palette for your logo and website design are marketing decisions.  Your location and target areas are marketing decisions.

Branding is a marketing agenda.  Your brand doesn’t directly ask people to do anything.  It’s an emotional association to your product and to your business image.  It’s how you get people to remember you.

When you have a solution and a marketing concept behind your business, you’re ready to add in advertising.

Advertising

When you consider marketing as we outlined it, you realize that much of it can’t be exactly measured.  It’s everything you do to facilitate an exchange between you and your clients.

Advertising, on the other hand, is a tactic.  Not only can it be measured, it must be to be maximized.

Advertising breaks into campaigns with specific budgets.  Online, they’re tied to exact conversion goals.

Here is the crux of the difference between online advertising and marketing.  Advertising uses campaigns defined by specific budgets, time frames, and result measurements.  You prescribe a budget, run the campaign for a specific period of time, and get exact measurements of the results.

For most small to medium size businesses, online advertising campaigns where you pay per click to win traffic are only run when there is a measurable revenue goal.  It’s simply too risky and difficult to spend on these types of campaigns just to create brand awareness or draw traffic into your informational material.

It’s also important to note that, in this light, marketing and advertising use different content.  When you advertising a special deal on your product, you want the landing page to match the message of that ad.  If you create that ad but then just drive the traffic to the general marketing content of your homepage, your results will suffer.

Ultimately, the difference we are outlining here has a lot to do with the phases of the buying cycle.  Marketing is used to create awareness of your value.  It may be a blog that fills information gaps or a banner that uses contextual info to appear for certain demographics or interests.

Advertising takes place farther along in the buying cycle, when the customer is aware they have the need and is looking for the best way to fill it.  Its job is to overcome the natural tendency to hesitate and get people to take that final action.

Can there be overlap?  Most certainly.  You may have an informational page that includes a call-to-action to buy.  Your advertising will support your branding.

But that doesn’t mean you should simply intermix the two.  Create distinct marketing and advertising campaigns with content for each.  The better you understand your customer’s needs, their place in the buying cycle, and the type of content they’ll respond to, the better all your results will be.