Marketing and Advertising: What’s the Difference?

We get a lot of questions about the difference between marketing and advertising so today, we want to answer a few of those we hear most often. The two concepts have the same goal—to get your brand, message, product or company in front of the right audience—so it can be easy to think they are the same thing, but they aren’t. 

Most simply, advertising is a branch of the marketing tree. Marketing is any practice or action that promotes your brand. It encompasses all the ways you reach your consumers, including sales, distribution and even pricing. Marketing is a process that includes research to identify a targeted audience, create strategies to reach that audience and implementing them. After implementation, additional research determines the effectiveness of those strategies and how to improve them. 

Paid advertising is a single branch—or strategy—many marketers use to accomplish their goals. Advertising uses a variety of media or channels to put a product, service or brand in front of the target audience through creative messaging and/or imagery. 

Advertising should always align with your marketing strategy and attract the desired audience. Some audiences respond better to radio ads while others respond better to ads on social media. These preferences should be analyzed while you create your marketing strategy. 

At Rooted Web, we dig deep to understand your ideal customer and create the marketing strategies that works best for your goals. If your strategy includes paid advertising, we will choose the advertising channel with the best potential, create powerful messages that work, design attractive ads that will get attention and measure your results and return on investment. Our marketing specialists are experts at creating marketing roadmaps that work. We take the time to get to know your business needs, evaluate your past marketing efforts and cultivate a marketing strategy that will help you attract and keep the customers you want. 

To see how the Rooted Web team can help your business grow, contact us today.