In today’s competitive world, marketing and advertising are essential to any business that seeks to get in front of its audience and boost sales. Although these concepts aren’t new, they are still often confused not only by non-professionals but by businesses as well. Indeed, these two terms overlap. But they aren’t identical.
If you are wondering about the difference between marketing and advertising, this article will zoom in on each of these concepts. Let’s dive deeper to see where they overlap and what distinctive features they have.
Table of Contents
What Is Marketing?
According to the American Marketing Association, the term “marketing” stands for an ongoing process of creating and spreading offerings that hold value for customers, partners, and society as a whole.
In simple words, it’s a continuous effort aimed at ensuring that your product or service doesn’t just sell, but is also:
- Relevant to your target niche and customers.
- Standing out among the competition.
- Capable of acquiring and retaining customers.
As you can see, there are many tasks and goals standing in front of marketing. For this reason, it’s a dynamic and very involved process that consists of many smaller elements. Its core fundamentals are summarized as the 4Ps:
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- Product (or service): The heart of your marketing is the offering you make. It has to be a product or service that resonates with your customers and addresses the specific needs or challenges they have.
- Price: The cost of your product/service is also a part of your larger strategy. It helps emphasize the value of your offering and stay competitive. At the same time, the price also determines the profitability of your business.
- Place: This part of your strategy defines the touchpoints across which you will be communicating with your audience. This is usually a combination of offline and digital channels.
- Promotion: Finally, the most important part is promotion. This is how you communicate your value proposition to potential customers and convert them. Promotion consists of many different tactics, one of which is advertising.
Based on this breakdown, you can easily say that marketing is a broader concept and advertising is rather a subset of it.
What Is Advertising?
Now, as was mentioned earlier, advertising marketing is a part of the big promotion process. To be more specific, this term stands for a paid form of promotion, which can include:
- Native ads
- Search ads
- Social media ads, etc.
The main purpose of advertising is to capture the attention of your target audience and persuade it to take a specific action. Your target action doesn’t necessarily have to be an immediate purchase of your product or service. It can also be a subscription, the start of a trial period, or else.
Today, there are many ways to use marketing advertising. It comes in handy for promoting a new product or service at launch. It also lets you fine-tune your audience and build awareness. And you can rely on it to draw attention to your special offer or discount. It’s a powerful tool for building a strong brand, communicating the benefits of your product/service, and generating leads. And there is a big advantage to paid promotion.
Apart from giving you access to your target audience and helping drive conversions, ads also give you access to a huge volume of critical customer data. Campaign tracking will give you insights into the behavior of your TA. This knowledge can help you optimize your future efforts.
Marketing and Advertising: 4 Key Distinctive Features
As you already know, these two terms are not the same. But what exactly makes them different? Let’s look at the four main distinctive features:
1. Scope
Marketing is a broad term that stands for the entire strategy a business uses to connect with its customers, acquire and retain them. It consists of many tools and strategies that cover steps from initial ones, such as niche study, product development, and price formation, to subsequent efforts like branding, promotion, and retention.
Advertising is much narrower. It consists of formulating a persuasive promotional message. It’s also about communicating the benefits of your product/service and spreading these materials through different paid channels.
2. Goals
Marketing aims for big and long-term goals, such as creating a positive brand identity, fostering lasting customer relationships, and meeting customer needs with your products and services. In a longer perspective, it also strives to maintain a good brand reputation and take a firm position in its niche. And, of course, it aims to build true loyalty and advocacy among customers.
Advertising, on the other hand, isn’t geared toward sustainable results. It’s usually a short-term approach aimed at fast results. Its primary goals include building awareness and stimulating TA to perform a specific action (e.g., click, sign up, buy, etc.).
3. Investment
Your overall promotional strategy is a massive ongoing process. Respectively, it’s a constant expenditure point. Every stage of this process, from research to content creation and customer support, requires investment.
Advertising in marketing is usually a short-term, channel-specific activity. It also requires investment, but on a smaller scale. Basically, the expenses involved in this process include producing ad materials, managing the campaign, and, of course, purchasing ad space.
4. Metrics
The success of your overall promotional strategy is shown in deep, long-term metrics. Usually, the focus is on KPIs that reflect the overall business health and success.
In marketing advertising, you will be looking at more specific metrics related to a particular campaign and channel. These specific metrics are used solely to assess the effectiveness of a campaign.
The Advertising Marketing Combo: How Do They Work Together?
So, marketing is the foundation of a brand. It’s a complex and multifaceted strategy. It spans a huge variety of tactics and targets long-term gains, such as:
- Brand awareness
- Recognition
- Sales
- Loyalty and retention
Advertising is just a subset of a large brand-building strategy. Yet, the importance of advertising in marketing management is huge.
Long-term brand building is the heart of your business. To achieve your goals, you need a strategy that combines a diversity of channels and tactics that align with your niche and TA.
Advertising is there to achieve short and medium-term goals. It helps drive instant attention and deliver the right messages to your audience. Most importantly, paid ads give you the feedback loop—by tracking your campaign performance, you gain valuable insights that can inform your big strategy and help you achieve greater results faster.
For maximum outcomes, you should create a balance of two.
When to Prioritize Marketing and When Advertising
While they work well together, there are certain cases when it’s worth prioritizing one tactic over another. Let’s look at some examples.
Marketing-first situations:
- Growing a startup. If you are a new player in your niche, your main focus should be on creating and establishing a strong brand identity through diverse channels.
- Building loyalty. When you have an established business that already has recognition and sales, a holistic strategy should be your first priority to build customer loyalty and foster brand advocates.
- Entering a new market. This situation requires deep research and a well-defined strategy that will help your business establish itself and compete against existing niche leaders.
Advertising-first situations:
- Enhancing visibility. A long-term promotional strategy helps build brand visibility from the ground up. However, if you are in a saturated niche, paid ads will help you reach more people and boost your prominence.
- New product/service launch. If you already have a strong brand and presence, a well-planned ad campaign can help you drive the needed attention to your launch.
- Promoting special offers. When you launch seasonal discounts, special deals, or other offers, using ads can help you spread the word about this to a large number of people at once.
How to Measure Success: Marketing vs Advertising KPIs
As was discussed earlier, these two approaches require different metrics to measure success. In this section, we’ll tell you about the most important KPIs for tracking digital marketing and advertising.
In a large promotional strategy:
- Market share
- Brand awareness
- Conversion rate
- Lead generation
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Customer satisfaction
- Return on investment (ROI)
In advertising campaigns:
- Reach
- Impressions
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Ad recall
- Sales uplift
- Cost per acquisition (CPA)
You can leverage specialized software to track and measure your KPIs with ease. Depending on your needs, you can find analytical tools that will have the needed functionality. You can also leverage complete toolkits that will help you measure these metrics, for example, many SEO tools for agencies combine a range of analytical features.
Real-World Case Studies
Now that you know when to focus on a big strategy or short-term campaign in theory, let’s look at a few specific cases.
Let’s start with a real-world case where a focus on a long-term promotional strategy helped reach the best results. A good example of this is Canva. Canva was a small design platform that grew to be one of the industry leaders and became a billion-dollar company in under a decade. Why? Because they focused on sustainable growth through smart promotion from day one.
The company used the beachhead approach—it captured different consumer categories in waves, carefully adjusting their message for everyone. The company leveraged different facets of promotion, including SEO, content, freemium, social media, and others, to create a sustainable strategy that works.
Now, let’s look at a case when a commercial campaign was the best choice. Gatorade is a major brand that has huge recognition. Yet, it operates in a crowded niche of beverages and wanted to boost its visibility and drive more sales.
Its most famous ad was launched after they signed a contract with Michael Jordan, who is a famous identity that’s also recognized all over. Both have sustainable promotional efforts at the heart of their brands. However, for visibility goals, they made an emphasis on paid ads and released their iconic “Be Like Mike” campaign. This campaign lifted Gatorade’s revenue from $681 million to over $1 billion in one year.
Conclusion
Marketing and advertising are closely related and overlapping concepts. But they are not the same. As you now know, the first one stands for a large promotional strategy that aims for long-term goals. Advertising, on the other hand, is a separate branch of promotion. It helps you score quick wins and get your message in front of your audience.
Now, you know how these two concepts differ. We’ve also discussed how they can work together and when it’s wise to prioritize one specific approach. Implement this knowledge in your business strategy to drive sales and growth!
