If you are running a business and are aiming to level up your game – or if you are starting to build one wanting to get to a good start, there are two things that you need to be familiar with: marketing and advertising.
While these two may have plenty of intersections, they endure great differences. These are two critical things that you need to be good at to make maximize your potential and reach out to as many people as possible.
In addition to knowing what they are, it’s equally important to know how they differ from each other. In that way, you will be able to maximize the strengths and use them both to your advantage at the right timing.
What is advertising?
Advertising is what you see on the billboards, on TV, and on social media that will pop up when you watch a video or when you’ve come across something. It’s ubiquitous.
It highlights a certain area of the product. Essentially, it’s a mechanism that enables business owners to get their word out in as a short amount of time as possible.
Advertising comes in many different ways other than short video snippets. When you listen to podcasts, there is also advertising happening there when the host plugs in about a particular product and raving how good that is. Advertising is talking about a product and selling it in a given medium.
What is marketing?
Marketing, on the other hand, is the process of how to get your product ready to be introduced to the market or how to keep it good-looking all the time. It is a constant process that just doesn’t happen in a single advertisement.
So, it’s safe to say that advertisement is part of a marketing strategy. On a bigger scale marketing is an all-inclusive term that embraces different areas to ensure that your product maintains a good reputation.
Marketing handles constant publicity in making sure that your product stays on the game while maintaining a competitive position. It is deciding how you will make the product known. And advertising is one of the ways how you can market a brand, a movement, a service, or a product.
The differences further explored
1) Time
Advertising often lasts a few seconds when it comes in a form of a video ad. It can stay for a while when it comes in a medium, such as a billboard. It can change from time to time, depending on the need.
Marketing entails the decision-making process when it’s the right time to release or pull out an advertisement.
2) Science
Marketing requires rigorous research to know what the consumers need. It also includes studying their behavior and knowing how they will respond. It involves how the audience or prospects engage in an advertisement that was released.
So, you see, marketing is always an ongoing process of observing any change in the consumers’ behavior to make sure that every opportunity is maximized. It’s a study of looking at every opportunity and knowing more to determine what’s best for the brand and the best way to advertise. It is a discipline that heavily relies on valid data.
3) Creativity
If marketing leans more towards science, advertising – on the other hand – relies more on creativity. Because the goal in advertising is to make your product more impactful, it needs to be creative to stand out. This is where you exhaust all the possible ways to have your product an easy recall and for it to become more engaging. Entertainment value is a must here.
4) Specificity
Advertising is more specific. You can advertise using short videos that only last a couple of seconds. You can do it on handouts. The takeaway here is it talks about a very specific area of your business, such as one product.
Marketing is the other way around as it is all about the activity that can make your brand more popular. It isn’t just about a product, but it’s also about your brand and your name. It has a greater scope, and only under it is where advertising rests.
Conclusion
At first, a lot will think that the two are just terms that can be interchanged depending on the degree of formality. But it shouldn’t be the case. Marketing is an umbrella term and science on how to get your message across your audience to increase your presence and improve your reputation.