Marketing vs. Advertising: What's the Difference?

 Marketing vs. Advertising

What's the Difference?

Whether you’re an experienced businessperson or someone just starting out, there’s no question that the two major components of marketing and advertising are crucial to the success of your company. However, when it comes to knowing how the two differ from one another, many people fall short in their understanding of what each component actually does for them and how their business can benefit from it. To help you better understand the differences between marketing and advertising, we’ve broken down what each component entails below.

What Is Marketing

It’s easy to think of marketing as being synonymous with advertising and promotion, but marketing is more than that. Marketing encompasses everything a business does to create value in its products and services, including improving product quality and functionality, increasing production efficiency and streamlining supply chains. It also includes brand development, which builds a sense of loyalty in consumers; advertising builds demand for your product or service through exposure and interaction with potential customers. Once you have created demand for your product or service, you can use pricing strategies to encourage sales (i.e., generating revenue).

What Is Advertising

There are lots of definitions for advertising, but here is how we define it here at Media Captain. Advertising is a marketing tactic that uses an intermediary to deliver a message (typically) to a consumer or business, encouraging them to think about and/or purchase a product or service. There are many different kinds of advertising, including print ads in newspapers and magazines, commercials on TV and radio, billboards, digital ads such as banner ads online and more. The primary goal of any ad is to persuade someone to take some sort of action -- whether it be clicking on an ad or making a purchase -- based on information presented in that ad. And you need marketing chops even if you're not designing your own ads!

How Do Businesses Use Marketing

Every business uses marketing, even if it isn’t a top priority. Marketing is an ongoing process—it’s not something you do once and call it good, then pick up tomorrow where you left off yesterday; it’s constantly evolving as markets change and consumer behavior changes with them. The goal of marketing is to identify your audience and figure out how to get their attention, hold their interest in your company or product, and ultimately turn them into loyal customers who will pay for what you have to offer.

How Do Businesses Use Advertising

There are a few different ways to go about it, but at its core, that’s what advertising is all about — and while most businesses use all three methods, they tend to emphasize one over others based on their goals and target audience. A business might rely heavily on digital marketing because their target audience lives online and social media ads are cheap and effective, or they might choose to advertise through billboards around town because it’s more cost-effective than radio or print advertisements in that area. Again, it really depends on where your target market hangs out most frequently. That said...

Key Takeaways for Entrepreneurs

Marketing and advertising are different in that marketing includes four Ps (product, price, placement and promotion) of a business, while advertising is one component of marketing. For example, if an entrepreneur hires a billboard advertisement, that would be considered advertising because it only involves one component of marketing (placement). On the other hand, hiring someone to do branding for your business would be considered marketing because it includes more than just one component—it also involves placing advertisements to create brand awareness through several mediums at once. The main point is that entrepreneurship encompasses many jobs that may include multiple aspects of marketing and advertising.

Additional Resources

It can be confusing trying to distinguish between marketing and advertising, especially because it seems like a lot of companies use both terms interchangeably. There are two key differences between marketing and advertising though: how information is transmitted, and how that information is delivered.