For years, marketing and advertising have remained very crucial to the success of every brand. But somehow, this hasn’t stopped people from using these two very different concepts interchangeably.
If you haven’t used these terms interchangeably, chances are you know someone who has. It’s important to set clear the distinctions between these concepts especially to small business owners.
What is marketing?
In the simplest of terms, marketing is every process involved in aligning a product or service with a target audience.
Some steps involved in marketing include:
1. Finding your market
2. Starting a conversation around your business.
3. Promotion through value-adding content and consistency.
In starting a conversation around your business, marketing can be either inbound or outbound.
Inbound marketing involves positioning yourself in a manner that allows your customer to initiate conversation around your brand. It generally involves brilliant content marketing and branding.
Outbound marketing, on the other hand, involves you taking the step and initiating conversation yourself. It involves sending your message out in the exact ways you want it.
Everything we’ve mentioned so far costs little to no money at all, but lots of time and energy.
What is advertising?
Advertising is simply the process of promoting your business or letting people know what products or services you have to offer. It’s very often paid for.
Generally, advertising is about increasing awareness and brand recognition. It’s about strategically getting the word out there through campaigns on different media depending on who the target is.
Unlike marketing, advertising mostly involves spending your time and money, lots of it.
Is marketing alone or advertising alone enough?
After going through the points, there may be some ideas forming in your mind that either one of these concepts can work on its own to drive your business’s success. This could be as a result of you not having enough time to spend on research and creation to drive your marketing or enough money to spend on advertising.
Sorry to burst your bubble but it’s incredibly hard to make either of these work on its own and one of the things you don’t want to do as a small business owner is make things hard for yourself.
Marketing is always the first step of advertising. Your service isn’t for everyone and the process of finding those people you want to advertise to is a part of marketing.
Here’s a tip: Do lots of marketing. Marketing in 2020 is mostly content marketing and content has a much longer shelf life than adverts, so you need to find that time and make it worthwhile.
Here’s another tip: Always do the marketing before the advertising. This way, you don’t need to do lots of advertising and you can save yourself some money.
You’re crushing it!
