Advertising And Marketing Differences And How They Relate To Your Business

"Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark.

You know what you are doing, but nobody else does."

-- Steuart Henderson Britt

"First we thought the PC was a calculator.

Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII --

and we thought it was a typewriter.

Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television.

With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure."

-- Douglas Adams

These definitions are from Wikipedia:

Advertising:

"Advertising is a form of communication that is intended to persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to purchase or take some action upon products, ideals, or services. It includes the name of a product or service and how that product or service could benefit the consumer, to persuade a target market to purchase or to consume that particular brand. . .

Commercial advertisers often seek to generate increased consumption of their products or services through branding, which involves the repetition of an image or product name in an effort to associate related qualities with the brand in the minds of consumers. . ."

Marketing:

"Marketing is the process by which companies create customer interest in goods or services. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customer and for themselves.

Marketing is used to identify the customer, to satisfy the customer and to keep the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, it can be concluded that marketing management is one of the major components of business management. . ."

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Now that you have read that, I'm sure you are clear on the differences, right? Well, don't feel alone if you're just as confused as you might have been prior. They are different, but in some respects, they are look-alike cousins.

I love to simplify these complicated kinds of things, so here is my ultra-simplified definition of the differences between marketing and advertising. Marketing is a strategy and advertising is an activity. There you go. The world will be impressed by how simplified that is. . . well, the long and short of it is that this is an excellent way to look at the differences.

In Upward Trend Management Services, we are essentially in marketing and we cross that line into activities now and again, but we say marketing and I believe that to be factual. Our business is developing a business strategy for helping small business market more effectively--not advertising more effectively, but market.

When you run an ad in the paper, yellow pages, TV, radio, that's advertising. It runs for a specified period for a specified cost and every business in the world that uses advertising wants immediate results to appear. Then there are those who are doing what we call, institutional advertising, where they are not making a specific, limited offer, but talking more generally about their product or service. Coca-Cola has led the world of soft drinks since the early 1900s using this type of advertising.

When you are marketing, you are making the public aware, positioning yourself in your marketplace, creating an image, and telling people what you do, who you are and how you do things. It is a strategy that includes how you handle sales, and your general business environment as related to a customer or client. It is more all encompassing, than the running of a special this week. Indeed, it is also, in our humble opinion, more important to the overall health, longevity and success of your enterprise.

Here's another way to look at marketing: It is creating influence. Whereas advertising seeks a specific action or thought, marketing is creating influence that can lead to becoming an authority, ranking relative to others in the same market, education of consumers and clients, and even service to the public.

We have learned to do marketing for our clients through the use of Internet influence. We do this with some basic and common tools, yet we are very uncommon in our overall approach and effectiveness in this field. The tools we use are websites, blogs, HTML email newsletters, surveys and the like, social networking which has become hotter every second of every day, and organic search engine optimization. We do all of this in a very inexpensive package and since they are used in harmony with one and other with specific strategies, they become ultra effective at creating influence. We just took one client in two months from non-existence on the web to first page on Google searches without buying one keyword. We do this for most of our clients.

Sometimes our clients or prospects confuse what we do with advertising. On your financial statement, you might lump the expense into that category called advertising, but what we do is far beyond and in the long run far more powerful and effective than advertising.

Give Terry a call at 707-434-9967 and ask me how you can benefit in your business and just how inexpensive it can be when someone specializes in this approach.