Marketing vs Advertising: Which one will make you more money?

Is there anything more frustrating for a business owner than spending the hours, money and energy creating an outstanding advertising campaign, only to realize when looking at the data that it was totally unsuccessful!

No one saw your creative, inspiring ad and you didn’t gain the increase in business that you were expecting. What went wrong? It may be a case of confusion when it comes to the differences between marketing vs advertising!

Marketing vs Advertising: Spot the difference?

Being a business owner often means that you will find yourself sorting through ‘buzzwords’ and suggestions about how to successfully run your business. Phrases such as “social strategy”, “sales funnels”, “content marketing”, and “click-through rate”, while important, can begin to merge together into one big marketing mess.

Our team at Burst Marketing are here to help decipher all of these terms and more.
Through the noise, one set of words seems to pop up again and again: marketing vs advertising. What is the difference between the two? Is there even a difference? Does your business need one more than the other?
Here we help to get rid of the confusion surrounding marketing vs advertising.

Marketing vs. Advertising: Basic Definitions

Marketing is the process that involves planning, promoting, and selling products or services for the marketplace. Advertising is a subset of the marketing process that specifically involves implementing promotional content in order to generate more sales and engagement.
These two terms are often used interchangeably, but as you can see from these definitions, they’re not really the same. Marketing is a broad category that oversees customer research and product placements, while advertising is a specific promotional process that falls under the marketing umbrella.
If you’re still sat in bewilderment, that’s okay. It’seasy to get the two terms mixed up, so let’s go a little further and examine both more closely.

What is Marketing?

Marketing is loosely defined as “the action or business of promoting and selling products or services.” Usually, marketing is underpins all of the things you do to get people talking about your business.
It basically involves both research and analysis. It is about studying the market and eventually coming up with a voice and design that will represent your brand. It can also include mission and vision statements, as well as slogans or taglines. All of these are incorporated in every marketing strategy to cultivate your brand’s personality.
Marketing can include researching your target demographic, creating social media channels to make reaching your audiences easier, designinggraphics to use throughout your different marketing campaigns and…advertising!

What is Advertising?

That’s right, advertising comes under the larger category of “marketing!” In fact, it’s silly to think in terms of marketing vs advertising as a business plan. Instead, consider your business’ overall marketing strategy as a completed puzzle: it’s made up of lots of smaller pieces. Advertising is just one of these pieces.
It is defined as “the act or practice of calling public attention to one’s product, service, need, etc.” Essentially, advertising acts as the “promoting” piece of the puzzle.
Old school advertising usually involved a radio or TV commercial. An ad positioned in a magazine or newspaper. Or maybe a huge board placed along a busy road to advertise your business. In the age of digital marketing, however, an advertising strategy should also include placing paid ads on social media platforms and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising utilizes the huge reach of social media channels and the data those platforms are able to collect in order to identify one or more audiences of users who are most likely to want or need your product or service.
These social media sites allow a business to create dynamic, engaging advertisements and push them out to a wide-reaching audiences. At Burst Marketing, we offer services to help our clients use their advertising budget and connect with their audiences on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn to the optimum capacity!
This type of advertising, when done correctly, leads to more traffic to your website, more interest from your target demographic and more revenue for your business!

PPC Advertising

Commonly recognised as Pay Per Click Advertising. PPC Advertising uses search engines such as Google or Yahoo to advertise directly to people who are searching for something related to your business.
Unlike social media advertisements, your business will only be charged a small fee when someone clicks on your ad link. This type of advertising relies heavily on keywords and a good understanding of your target audience.Depending on your click rate, it enables your business to rank temporarily at the top of your search list, meaning your business has higher visibility than perhaps it usually would.