Are you new to the business world and getting confused with all this talk about having to do marketing and advertising for your business? Fear not, this article will help to demystify the two.
While the two sound similar, advertising and marketing are not the same thing.
Advertising is what you do as part of your marketing activity. It is a component of the marketing process and is a way to get the message across to an audience using a variety of mediums to promote the product. So you may advertise your products and services on the radio, TV, in magazines, websites and even by distributing flyers.
Marketing on the other hand looks at everything to do with your brand right from research to design, to advertising to sale.
Advertising is an important part of a marketing strategy and can also be the most expensive.
An easy anagram to differentiate between advertising and marketing is to consider marketing as a cake. If you cut the cake, advertising will be one of the pieces of that cake. The other pieces of cake could be market research of the product, product design, PR, product pricing, customer satisfaction, customer support, sales etc. All these components or pieces of cake should work independently but collectively in achieving the bigger goal i.e. to help sell products and/or services and build your brand’s reputation in the market.
Marketing is a marathon process involving many tasks that involve hours sometimes days of research. The research part of marketing takes the longest duration as it involves thoroughly understanding the behavior of people towards a product.
Designing the product and developing advertising strategy is can also be time consuming, but it’s best to get it right than to rush this stage.
If this was helpful, you can access more detailed information in the Mothers Who Work Club.
