Think marketing and advertising are the same thing? Think again. They’re closely related, however, there are some subtle but important differences.
In short, advertising is one specific part of marketing that focuses on creating awareness for your product or service. Marketing is an integrated overall system of bringing your product or service to consumers. Marketing includes things like market research, design, integration, traffic building, and yes, advertising. Marketing is focused on the exchange of value, both business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B), through these prior mentioned tactics.
To put it in as simple terms as possible, marketing is the holistic strategy of getting your products and services to consumers, while advertising is one facet of that strategy that calls attention to your product or service.
Think of marketing like a battleship, and advertising are some of the biggest guns on that battleship. But there are additional guns and weapons and tactics that make up an effective business strategy as well.
Here at Amplify Digital Marketing, we do both marketing and advertising. We call ourselves marketers because we create entire systems of getting your message out to consumers, which in turn brings in more customers and more revenue.
Let’s Talk About the Different Facets of Marketing
While there are many facets to a marketing strategy, we’ll talk about some of the most common in the digital world: research, planning, traffic building, advertising, retention and conversion, and analysis and refining. We’ll talk specifically about how we do these at ADM, which is true for much of the digital world.
Research— Any good marketing strategy starts with research. This involves your rankings on search engines like Google (higher rankings mean more clicks, more clicks mean more customers), where your competitors are ranking, holes in the market that your business could fill, which types of advertising or advertisement may be useful for your particular business and goals, etc.
Planning— The next step in a good marketing strategy is planning. We’ll take this research and create a specific plan for your business, based on what will be most effective. Perhaps for your business it will be localization, or it could be professionally written product descriptions, it could be a heavy focus on SEO or social media. Likely, it’s a combination of these things, but with research we can place appropriate weight on each.
Traffic Building— Here’s where the plan starts to take shape, and we begin implementation. One of the first and most important steps to digital marketing is getting people to come to your website, then keep them there and convert them. Traffic building uses many processes, but one of the most important is our next term…
Advertising— This is where we place advertisements on places like Facebook and Google, start building your branding and reach on social media, and use other methods to attract people to your website.
Retention and Conversion— Once we have people on your site and in your digital spaces, we think about how to turn potential customers into just customers. We do this by keeping them on the site (we call this time spent) and getting them to purchase or sign up (this is called conversion). There are many methods to do these, most focused around content building.
Analysis and Refining— Finally, we’ll analyze all of the work we’ve done to see what’s working well and what could use improvement. Based on this analysis we can make changes to the strategy as well as individual parts of the strategy.
Need Some Digital Marketing or Advertising Help? Give Us a Call Today!
We know not everyone nerds out about this kind of thing, which is why we’re here to help. For any business owner a basic understanding of marketing and its terms is helpful, but you don’t need to know everything— that’s our job.
To put it simply, if you’d like us to help market and advertise your business, give us a call today for a free consultation.
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