What is the difference between marketing and advertising? In its simplest form, advertising is buying an ad like a newspaper display offering two burgers for the price of one. Marketing creates a background of value and need, like an article about the benefits of 100% beef. Newspapers have articles or stories in addition to ads.
For a little more clarification here are two definitions:
What is advertising?
“Advertising is an audio or visual form of marketing communication that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea.” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising
Advertising and marketing should work together.
The following definitions were approved by the American Marketing Association Board of Directors.
Marketing:
Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
(Approved July 2013)
Closely related is Marketing Research:
“Marketing research is the function that links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through information–information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process. Marketing research specifies the information required to address these issues, designs the method for collecting information, manages and implements the data collection process, analyzes the results, and communicates the findings and their implications. (Approved October 2004)” – https://www.ama.org/AboutAMA/Pages/Definition-of-Marketing.aspx
Several years ago my wife and I wrote a book on market research. It’s out of publication now, but went through numerous printings in English, Chinese, and Polish. We wrote the book so small business entrepreneurs wouldn’t lose their hard earned money on ventures that were faulty to begin with.
Most small business owners are constantly bombarded by people claiming to represent Google and who want to provide SEO services. SEO, stands for Search Engine Optimization, which means making sure a website has the right information within the website for Google to recognize and understand what the website is providing, which would be marketing. However, what these pesky call are about is advertising. They want to sell an advertising service. For example, I helped a friend who was teaching marketing to an evening class of business owners. I stepped into to provide information about SEO and marketing. One of the owners had a question about his company’s website. At the break I went to his seat and had him bring up his website on his laptop. I looked at the site and the background source. “What’s the problem?” “My website doesn’t show up on searches for radial snow tires,” he said. I responded quickly, “Your website isn’t about radial snow tires. You don’t even mention radial snow tires.” “What do you mean,” he said stabbing at a picture of radial snow tires with a giant graphic of radial snow tires, “What do you call those?” I simply shrugged my shoulders and said, “Search engines don’t have eyes. They can’t see images. You don’t mention radial snow tires in your title, your description, your keywords, your actual headlines, nor your page content. Without written communication, the search engine has nothing to go on. Search engines can’t see your snow tires or your large graphic headline because it’s an image. At the very least, you could have an ALT command added to your background information to describe what your image is.” He gave me his business card and said, “Please, call me Monday.”*
We have local online business directories from Portland to Bellingham. We charge a flat fee per month. We list a paragraph of information for our local clients about who they are and what services they offer. That’s marketing. We also provide a banner ad for some. That’s advertising. If www.publicdoman.com built their website, then their site has complete SEO (marketing). For some clients we also handle pay-per-click advertising for very select services and locations. But, to use pay-per-click advertising without marketing direction is foolhardy and a waste of time as well as money.
* This example is true, but it wasn’t about tires.
