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Marketing vs.
Advertising
Are marketing and advertising the same thing? Not really, although they are closely connected. Many businesses make the mistake of thinking that hiring an advertising-only agency means their whole marketing strategy is covered. Likewise, others may need advertising services but end up hiring SEO marketers who don’t have that experience.

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NEWMEDIA: Marketing vs. Advertising Explained

Are marketing and advertising the same thing? Not really, although they are closely connected. Many businesses make the mistake of thinking that hiring an advertising-only agency means their whole marketing strategy is covered. Likewise, others may need advertising services but end up hiring SEO marketers who don’t have that experience. When it comes to marketing vs. advertising, understanding the differences can help you focus your budget in the right direction.  

Diagram showing the relationship between market research, marketing strategy, and marketing tactics, with a focus on the 4Ps: promotion, place, product, and price.

So, what is the difference between marketing and advertising? Primarily, marketing means your overall strategy for positioning your products and services so they attract the attention of your target audience. As the image above from Ahrefs shows, advertising is one facet of this, focusing on particular ways of doing this.

This article helps you understand advertising, marketing definitions, and the main differences between the two.

What Is Marketing?

Let’s start your marketing vs. advertising exploration with a brief explanation of marketing. Marketing is any activity that promotes the sale or distribution of your products and services. Your company’s marketing strategy is the overall plan that determines how you will do this. Marketers will usually document this plan and make changes based on the success or failure of campaigns.

A marketing strategy typically starts with market research to discover who is most likely to want your goods or services. This is called defining your target audience. In it, marketers break a target audience into segments and ideal customer profiles (ICPs) to help create multiple, highly focused marketing campaigns.

Each campaign can consist of content or methods that work across multiple channels. Some marketing campaigns may focus on a single channel, for example, an email marketing campaign. It all depends on what the goal of the campaign is and how long marketers want it to run.

What Is Advertising?

Now, you can go deeper into advertising vs. marketing by looking at what advertising actually means. The main difference between advertising and marketing is that one is an aspect of the other. Advertising falls under the marketing umbrella, but not all marketing is advertising.

An advert or advertisement is a piece of media, either physical or digital, that prompts a viewer to take action. That action might be to click a link, buy a product, or visit a store. Advertisements take up paid space. For example, you might pay Google Ads to position your business website high on the search engine results page. Alternatively, you might pay a company to design and print flyers that advertise a store opening.

It’s possible to do your own advertising, but it’s very time-consuming, and you rarely have the resources of an experienced advertising provider or agency. With the right partner, advertising can be a lucrative part of your overall marketing strategy.

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Marketing Strategy Examples

Understanding the general concepts of marketing and advertising is step one. Step two is exploring the different types of marketing and advertising that businesses can use to raise their brand’s profile.

Statistic showing that 94% of small businesses plan to increase their marketing spending in 2024.

It’s important to keep yourself updated about current marketing strategies to keep ahead of your competitors. As the statistic above shows, most businesses are pumping money into their marketing budgets, indicating expanding and shifting marketing strategies. If you don’t find ways to stand out in the crowd, you could quickly lose traction in your market.

Business marketing has dozens of subsections. However, you can get started by discovering just a few of the most common, listed below.

Content Marketing Strategies

Content marketing refers to any writing, images, video, or audio that helps spread awareness of your organization. Examples of content, also called digital assets, include:

  •         Blogs
  •         Product descriptions
  •         Whitepapers
  •         Podcast featuring your company or company members
  •         Product demonstration videos
  •         Reviews
  •         Images of your products in use
  •         Email campaigns
  •         Newsletters
  • Social media captions

As you can see, anything that you create for the purpose of promoting your brand can be considered content marketing. Although creating unique assets takes time, content marketing strategies are worth investing in, as 72% of businesses state that they help them increase leads.

SEO Marketing

SEO stands for search engine optimization and means the practice of ensuring your website appears prominently in search engine page results (SERPs). SEO marketing is intrinsically linked to content marketing, as you can use multiple SEO techniques in written and visual content. For example, you can insert relevant keywords and phrases into blogs to help them appear when people search for those words. You can add alt text and tags to images that prompt search bots and crawlers to make them appear more prominently in searches.

However, not all SEO marketing has to do with content. SEO techniques include making sure your website has a logical structure and ensuring that URLs are sensical and relevant to popular searches.

Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Both of the above facets of marketing fall under the category of inbound marketing. When you utilize inbound marketing techniques, you create reasons for the customer (or lead) to come to you. Outbound marketing, on the other hand, is all about chasing down leads. Some businesses do this with an outbound sales team. These professionals will call companies or individuals that match their ICPs and suggest solutions to problems they may have. Other outbound techniques include promoting goods at a trade show or convention or certain types of email campaigns.

Digital Marketing

When you promote goods or create content online, you’re participating in digital marketing. Any type of marketing that takes place over the internet — including on smartphones and tablets — is classed as digital marketing. A comprehensive whitepaper exploring the intricacies of tax law is just as much an aspect of this type of marketing as a short caption on Instagram.

Social Media Marketing

When you use Instagram and other social platforms to promote your brand or products, this is called social media marketing. There are a number of ways to use social media for marketing, including creating pages and groups, sharing content, and advertising.

Effective Advertising Strategies

Now that we’ve come neatly back to advertising, let’s take a look at some of the most popular advertising strategies to invest in.

Pie chart showing small businesses' main goals for advertising: 32% increase sales/revenue, 19% miscellaneous others, 12% convert leads to customers, 11% stand out from competitors, 11% improve brand awareness, 8% increase brand trust, and 7% improve search ranking.

Advertising strategies are generally aimed at generating sales or revenue, as seen in the graphic above. You can use any of the below methods to achieve this, particularly when you partner with an advertising expert like NEWMEDIA.

Social Media Advertising

To stay in the world of social media, there are plenty of opportunities to advertise on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and numerous other platforms. You’ll probably notice some of these ads as you scroll through your own feed. They appear in between posts, showing products or events that you might be interested in.

However, many social platforms have expanded the way they offer advertising. Some now offer ads between videos. Others even offer in-stream advertising — ads that appear when you “go live.”

Mobile Advertising

Mobile advertising covers any type of ad that appears on someone’s cell phone or other portable device, such as a tablet. So, social media advertising can come under this category, but so can ads sent by messaging services such as WhatsApp and even SMS advertising. Mobile advertising is a popular technique for reaching potential customers, as most people have their phones with them at all times.

PPC Advertising

Pay-per-click or PPC advertising is a type of advertising that only charges a business when someone clicks the link in the ad. You normally find these ads at the top of search engine results, on social media, or sometimes embedded in website content.

Traditional Advertising

All of the above are forms of digital advertising. However, conventional advertising is still common, using numerous traditional media from magazines to outdoor advertising like billboards to TV. Some advertising agencies don’t work with traditional media. However, others may have designers who can help you make print ads such as flyers, brochures, or catalogs for direct mail campaigns.

Marketing vs. Advertising: Which Should Your Business Invest In?

You’ve no doubt come to realize that in order to get the most from the channels available to you, you need to exploit the opportunities of both marketing and advertising campaigns. Most effective marketing strategies will utilize a combination of methods, incorporating advertising as appropriate to help reach your target audience.

The best approach is to build a marketing plan that includes options for advertising across multiple channels. Work with a full-service marketing agency like NEWMEDIA to discover what advertising platforms are most likely to bring your organization significant returns. We help you create a marketing mix of techniques that complement each other and maximize your budget.

They’re incredibly professional and communicative. NEWMEDIA is definitely an expert in their field.

Molly Hall Dorais

Director of Enrollment
Colorado Rocky Mountain School

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NEWMEDIA: A Full-Service Agency for Marketing and Advertising

Now that you understand the difference between marketing and advertising, it’s time to think about the best partner to leverage the opportunities offered by both. NEWMEDIA helps clients across dozens of industries find the best ways to reach new customers or clients.

Take a look at some of the services we offer.

Social Media Marketing

Our team handles social media marketing for clients who want to make a big impact across multiple channels.

Bar chart showing the total number of social media users worldwide from April 2020 to April 2022, reaching 4.65 billion.

As you can see from this graphic, there are close to 5 billion social media users worldwide. That’s a huge opportunity to reach potential customers and clients — with the right marketing expertise.

Over half of companies state that they don’t understand how to measure or integrate their social media marketing ROI. NEWMEDIA can help you create impactful campaigns and monitor and track performance accurately.

Search Engine Optimization

From socializing to shopping, today’s consumers are online more than ever. SEO skills are essential for unlocking the marketing potential of your online content. NEWMEDIA keeps a finger on the pulse of rapidly shifting search engine algorithms and SEO techniques. We use that expertise to help your site, blog, and other online portals gain traction and climb the SERPs.

Google and other search engines may change their algorithms daily. Work with a team that can stay ahead of that fast-moving curve.

PPC Advertising

NEWMEDIA also helps clients set up, run, track, and continuously improve advertising campaigns across various platforms. We can help position your online store prominently with ecommerce PPC services for effective online retail advertising. Or, we can help you integrate digital advertising into your overall marketing strategy.

PPC Ad Management

Setting up ad campaigns is only the first step to success. NEWMEDIA offers full PPC ad management, helping you understand ROI and when ad details or focus keywords need to change.

Bar chart showing digital ad spending worldwide from 2019 to 2024, with a rise from $325.02 billion to $526.17 billion.

Digital advertising expenditure is on the rise, as this graphic from WordStream shows. In that light, PPC can represent a cost-effective way to drive near-instant traffic to your site, but only with the right support. Talk to our team about how we help you manage and track your ad campaigns from start to finish.

Performance Monitoring and Tracking

Marketing and advertising strategies are only effective if you understand what’s working and what’s not. NEWMEDIA helps organizations stay in control of all their campaigns, carefully monitoring progress and reporting on success. You can use this data to create reports for business leaders and stakeholders, or to use as further marketing materials for clients. Accurate data helps you hone your marketing mix to perfection.

They performed stellarly. We work very cohesively together, collaboratively, and with very substantial synergy. The amount of content and creative addition that we have since contracting with NEWMEDIA is second to none.

Randall T.

Founder

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Why Choose NEWMEDIA for Your Business?

NEWMEDIA is trusted by clients from industries as varied as television and transport. We look after the marketing needs of some of the biggest companies in the nation and have multiple awards to show for it. 

Accolades received:

  • Clutch Top 1000 Global Companies Award
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  • Unites States National Excellence Winner
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  • SEOblog Top Rated SEO Agency Winner
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  • Mashable Global Award Winner

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We also have a 4.7/5 star rating on Google Reviews and countless testimonials and case studies from satisfied clients.

Marketing vs. advertising doesn’t have to be a mystery. If you want to get more out of both your digital marketing strategy and your advertising efforts, contact our team at [email protected].

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