Marketing vs Advertising Strategies Explained
The terms marketing vs advertising is often used interchangeably.
And while these two concepts are related, there are some critical differences to be aware of when strategies are planned and decisions are made on attracting consumers’ attention.
As a business owner, you must know how these concepts are different, as these can significantly affect the long-term success of any company.
For instance, radio, TV, and digital are common forms of advertising.
Yet how a brand is marketed across all media differs from how an ad would be presented.
While marketing and advertising objectives often have similar goals (e.g., generating interest and encouraging conversions), distinct differences must be clarified and explained.
According to PPC and SEO expert Arjun Sandhu, “marketing is a broader term that means putting the Brand message out there, whereas advertising is one of the ways to do that”.
Arjun explains that with an example: “for instance, marketing may include branding, messaging, design and story, but advertising is a process to bring all of that in front of the potential consumer (usually using paid media).”
Arjun runs an online marketing agency in London and has worked with some of the UK’s most popular travel and gaming brands.
To know more about different advertising and marketing techniques, you may check out Ergonotes.
Advertising and marketing both need a medium and a form to convey your message to your audience.
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Marketing vs Advertising Explained
Advertising is the paid, non-personal distribution of a persuasive message to promote products or services to current or potential customers.
Advertising focuses on a message that’s not all that personal.
It is a process that includes the following:
• Ad placement (newspapers, TV, direct mail, billboards, radio, online)
• Frequency of ads displayed
• Tracking of results from ads placed or displayed
With the number of businesses offering advertising services today, it’s easy to find one that provides an online ad maker free to try.
This advertising service can be a godsend, especially for small businesses or those just starting in the industry.
Marketing is taking goods or services from the concept phase to the point where customers want to purchase those goods or products from an individual business or brand.
It’s how a brand communicates to its audience in a way that’s more personal beyond trying to sell a particular product or service.
Marketing involves:
• The Four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion
• Strategy development and execution
• Ongoing communications and sustained audience engagement
Advertising is one component of the marketing process.
It is the most considerable marketing-related expense a business will have just behind public relations, representing another chunk of the marketing pie.
As with marketing, advertising also creates awareness, although the primary goal is to influence buying behaviours.
Think about your favourite brands.
You may prefer Pepsi over Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut over Papa John’s, or Walmart over Target because of marketing.
Those Super Bowl commercials you remember with fondness result from creative advertising efforts.
What Is An Advertising Strategy?
An ad strategy is an overall plan for a particular ad campaign.
It encompasses specific tactics designed to meet the goals and objections determined as part of the process of putting together an advertising strategy.
It should support the overall marketing strategy, supporting a brand’s broader business plan.
To carry out an ad strategy, a series of tactics will need to present products or services to an audience that may be receptive to what’s offered.
Advertising and its possible strategies are a subset of marketing and its related techniques.
With advertising, it is essential to find the right “media mix” with tactics that may include online advertising, billboards, magazines, TV, radio, and direct mail rather than relying solely on one form of media.
An effective ad strategy is also one that includes the following:
• Determining the right frequency of ads to avoid spreading the allotted ad budget too thin
• Selecting the right media mix
• Using media that targets the primary audience/consumer group
• Hitting target demographics repeatedly to keep the featured products/services visible
Related Article: First impressions
What Is An Effective Advertising Strategy?
An effective advertising plan or strategy starts with understanding where a particular product or service currently stands in marketing; regarding both perception and market share (demand).
An effective ad strategy can be broken down into four steps:
1. Clearly defining business goals
2. Identifying behaviour changes necessary to achieve those goals
3. Selecting the appropriate behavioural approach (what will likely convince a consumer to make a purchase)
4. Developing creative ideas based on the selected behavioural strategies
As with marketing, advertising also involves knowing your target audience.
Advertising means knowing how the target consumers spend their free time, what they prefer to read, where they tend to go online, where they likely work, and even what colour t-shirts they like to wear.
An ad strategy should also include a determination of:
• Where a product or service stands in the marketplace (customer perception, market share)
• Primary and secondary target audiences for a product or service
• Which media channels (print, broadcast, online, etc.) will likely reach those target audiences
• Markets that should be targeted with various media and how much should be spent on such efforts in each market
• Specific selling points that will be emphasised in ads
• How well is ad copy/content tested before fully launching a campaign
• How effective a campaign was after it was launched (post-analysis)
Types of Advertising Strategies
Specific products or services can be promoted in multiple ways.
Traditional advertising strategies like television and radio ads and billboard advertising that target broader audiences can still be helpful if carefully planned.
Ad strategies that are part of a broader marketing strategy may also include:
• Google AdWords (pay-per-click)
• Facebook ad strategies specific to highly targeted consumers based on factors like age, income, gender, and location)
• Cold calling/emailing
• Direct mail
• Traditional approaches (television, radio, newspaper)
Advertising strategies can be further broken down by what’s likely to motivate a consumer to have an interest in or to purchase a particular product.
For instance, the “utility strategy” focuses on how useful a product is to the consumer.
An example is bacon, which is 10 per cent leaner than the competition offers.
Behavioural ad strategies also include:
• Modelling: Using celebrities or experts.
• Reframing: Reshaping general assumptions (“eat baby carrots as junk food”).
• Evocation: Tapping into emotions to inspire action.
• Collectivism: Reinforcing or creating social norms (“let your inner beauty shine through”).
• Skill-up: Showing someone how to do something with a product.
• Elimination of complexity: Removing barriers to product/service use.
• Commitment: Inviting smaller services to convince users of a related service (free credit report for an identity protection service).
What Is A Marketing Strategy?
A marketing strategy is a list of goals based on understanding the target consumer/user, what they should buy or use, and where they typically seek those products and services.
Marketing strategies can be divided into two broad categories:
• Inbound Marketing: An inbound marketing strategy is where content is placed in front of consumers who are likely to be interested in a brand, product, or service. The content aligns with customers’ interests with methods that may include social media posts and content optimised for search engines.
• Outbound Marketing: An outbound marketing strategy requires finding potential customers interested in a particular product, service, or brand. This outreach may be in cold calls, postcards, or mass emails.
What Is An Effective Marketing Strategy?
An effective marketing strategy is backed up by a well-researched marketing plan to achieve the KPIs that have been established.
There are many cost-effective ways to connect with audiences, primarily through digital marketing.
Let’s break it down into six steps:
- Identifying unique selling points of a brand/business will require you to look at the company’s current operations and determine what makes yours unique in the industry. Do you offer 24/7 customer service? Are your products affordable yet made with high-quality materials? Knowing your unique selling points is essential, as these can become your edge when you create an impactful marketing strategy.
- Defining the target audience: One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is implementing a marketing strategy just for the sake of it. Companies in different parts of the world invest many resources in their marketing, which is why many other businesses are pressured to do the same. Aside from ensuring you have enough resources to create and implement an effective marketing strategy, you must know for whom your marketing campaign is for. Creating a marketing strategy should be on top of your to-do list.
- Listing the benefits of products and services: For you to effectively market your products and service, it’s not enough that you only tell your target audience to buy from you. To make it easier for them to choose your business, you should also educate them about the benefits of their products and services. If you’re selling shoes, for example, you should let your target audience know how this product can improve their day-to-day lives so they’ll choose to buy from you.
- Describing how goods and services will be positioned in the market: This process will require you to develop a positioning statement and assess your competitors’ existing marketing strategies.
- Identifying marketing/advertising methods that are most appropriate (The Internet, direct marketing, PR, etc.)
With the right marketing strategy, both bigger and small brands can effectively compete for the same consumers/audience.
Typical marketing strategies include, but certainly, aren’t limited to:
• Producing new content on blogs and websites
• Determining the right social media platforms to use for content distribution (e.g., Pinterest and Instagram for images and videos, and Twitter for short announcements)
• Organic (keywords, links, relevant content) and paid (pay-per-click) search engine optimisation (SEO)
• Local SEO with geographic-specific content
• Email marketing with newsletters and emails specific to the recipient
• Media mentions and Internet-based PR
• Creating “wow” moments likely to generate buzz (guerilla marketing)
• Larger amounts of content in the form of ebooks or email newsletters
Marketing Plan
Planning is doing, as in actually putting those ideas into motion.
Think of a marketing strategy that sets the tone for how a brand interacts with the public.
A marketing plan is an outline of the specific actions that will be taken to achieve those goals and objectives.
A marketing plan includes a detailed analysis of the following:
• Size/potential of various markets
• Who primary/secondary audiences are in each target market
• Strengths/weaknesses of distribution channels
• Competitors’ products and services, especially within the same market(s), with particular attention paid to pricing strategies, incentives, and distribution channels used
• What pricing strategies will likely be effective
• Results from tracked data (sales, market share)
• How much of a budget will be necessary for marketing and promotion efforts
Marketing Tactics
Marketing tactics are practical, tangible, and trackable things that a brand does every day to reach out to its audience (e.g., tweeting, blogging, responding to social media posts, and sending out email newsletters).
The primary available strategies for attracting consumer interest are the same as they have been since marketing.
Tactics, however, are heavily based on technology and trends.
Here’s an example of how strategy and tactics work together:
Goal: Increase year-end revenue by 20 per cent.
Objectives: Increase brand awareness by 50 per cent and boost the website by 25 per cent over last year’s results.
Strategy: Focus more on-brand messaging across all media and increase social media engagement to direct more traffic to the website.
Tactics: Launch paid Facebook and Twitter ad campaigns, re-write social media profiles, distribute coupon codes in the early afternoon and late evening, add relevant images and videos to blog and social media content and include appropriate links back to the website.
Key Takeaways on Marketing vs Advertising Strategies
Creating a marketing plan and strategy is usually going to be a more time-consuming process than creating an advertising campaign.
This is because marketing has a broader scope and involves individual processes like compiling market research, analysing current and potential markets, and positioning and segmentation that require more attention than needed to create an effective ad campaign.
In a nutshell, here are the key differences between marketing and advertising:
• Advertising is a single component of marketing
• Marketing has a broader range that goes beyond promoting an available product or service to include the promotion of a particular business or brand
• Advertising focuses on the relationship between customers and specific goods or services
• Marketing takes into account all interactions between a brand and its intended audience
• Advertising supports marketing by creating buzz for a brand’s products or services
• Marketing encompasses the overall customer experience with a brand and involves creating consumer relationships beyond the point at which a sale is made
Think of advertising as a piece that fits into the broader marketing puzzle.
The two concepts are related and often linked, but there are significant differences to remember when planning strategies, launching campaigns, tracking results, and targeting specific audiences.
Understanding the role of advertising and marketing can ultimately help you achieve one important goal — reaching out to consumers who are likely interested in what you offer.
It’s a goal often made with careful planning, insightful observations, ongoing engagement, and informed decision-making.
