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Whats the difference between Marketing and Advertising?
Blog Marketing, Advertising June 22nd, 2007
Visited 1087 times, 1 so far todayDo you know the difference between advertising and marketing? I’ve found when speaking to people that they get confused between the two. I know I did at one point 
Generally, the key thing to remember is that marketing is all about planning and doing your research. Advertising on the other hand is about having your product or service ready and making it visible and selling to the public and to sell a product you must advertise it right? You could say advertising is a segment of marketing.
Here are 2 simple definitions to make it even clearer.
One Definition of Marketing
Marketing is known as “inbound marketing” and involves a wide range of business activities (as shown in the diagram) that are needed to ensure you are meeting the needs of your customers and getting something in return. Marketing activities include for example market research to find out for example if there is a need for your product or service that you want to sell and what the competition is like, finding your market niche, finding out what consumers needs are and seeing if they are already met, seeing if there are products or services out there that need improving - there may well be.
So you now may be asking, how do I conduct this market research? well, one example could be surveys or questionnaires and these could be carried out either face-to-face or by telephone calling. Over the internet is another good way. You could go check out forums and become an active member or better still invite feedback on your website.
“Outbound marketing” therefore is everything you do from here onwards to enable your business to grow so that involves continued advertising, public relations, sales strategy, community involvement etc. Marketing can take time and hours of work but in the long run that hard work pays off.
One Definition of Advertising
Advertising is known as “outbound marketing” and is all about making potential and existing customers aware of a particular product or service that you are trying to sell them. Advertising is focused on one particular product or service and could differ from another product service that is out there. Advertising examples are newsletters, emailing, bulletin boards, distributing leaflets or flyers, newspapers, TV commercials, direct mailings, personal contact, radio and of course the Internet.
I hope the two now make more sense. What I have done is made an excel pie graph so you can see the full picture.
Now looking at the diagram you can see that Advertising is only a small segment of the marketing cycle but it still plays a very important role. It’s the part that involves getting the word out about your business, product or service that you want to sell to the public. You can also see a mixture of other different activities that have to work together as well as independently to archive the best possible results.Â
Did you know that Advertising is the biggest marketing expense with public relations following right behind it and then market research?
