Marketing vs. Advertising: Understanding Their Key Differences

True or false: marketing and advertising are the same thing? Even though these two terms are often used interchangeably, they are actually quite different! Although, they are closely related! So, what’s the difference between advertising and marketing? We’ll save all the details for later, but all their dissimilarities boil down to one thing: all advertising is marketing, but not all marketing is advertising. If you’re still a little bit confused about the distinction between marketing and advertising, keep reading. We’ll talk about the unique roles they both have in business strategy formulation and success.

Advertising & Marketing Definition Exploration

We invite you to think about something. How can you differentiate something without a clear idea of what you’re comparing? So, at least for now, let’s not make this about marketing vs. advertising. Instead, we will further explore what these two standalone concepts are (and what they are not). Having a foundational knowledge of these two terms will make it easier to identify later on whether something is marketing or advertising. If you still can’t separate the two after the next subsections, don’t worry! There’s more discussion to be had.

What is Marketing?

Let’s talk about the first step in understanding the difference between marketing and advertising. Marketing refers to everything that you do to promote products and brands, whether directly or indirectly. A crucial marketing and advertising difference that you’ll see highlighted later on is how the former is about value creation. It’s not just about selling a product or telling your audience about an upcoming launch. When thinking about marketing, you’ll see there is a lot that happens behind the scenes. The products of such efforts may not be immediately income-generating, but they’re still important for any business.

What is Advertising?

Advertising is a part of marketing that focuses specifically on communicating promotions to the target audience. When you assess marketing and advertising, you’ll see that the latter always involves some form of paid promotion. Traditionally, this happened through radio, print and TV ads. However, that’s not the case anymore. One of the reasons for this is the blurring of the lines between marketing and advertising. For example, an organic social media post can still be advertising if published by a paid influencer. Just remember, your goal with advertising is to reach your desired audience to get immediate results. This can be leads, income or engagement, as long as you get it all ASAP.

What is the Difference Between Marketing and Advertising? A Lot!

Are you ready for a more comprehensive take on the differences between marketing and advertising? The next subsections will take a closer look at their distinctions. After we cover both topics, it should be clear how marketing is different from advertising. At least on some level, you should also be able to see how these two things help businesses grow. After all, it’s not a competition between marketing and advertising. Despite their differences, they both work towards a common overarching goal.

Scope and Focus

Advertising takes a narrower focus. It is all about promoting a product or service across various paid channels. However, when comparing marketing and advertising, it’s important to remember that these two are not mutually exclusive. Aside from the scope of advertising, marketing also involves pricing strategies, market research, product development, product or service distribution and more. So, is marketing the same as advertising? In some sense, yes. However, as we just mentioned, the marketing activities go beyond the undertakings of advertising.

Strategic vs. Tactical Approach

Being more strategic in nature, marketing is a lot like chess in the sense that everything is planned for the long term. When comparing marketing and advertising, you’ll see how the former has more moving parts that can work together in delivering long-term business success. Meanwhile, advertising is like checkers: it’s more tactical in nature. When you assess marketing and advertising examples, you’ll see how the latter is tied to actions that you can initiate immediately.

Customer Journey and Brand Building

From building brand awareness to generating engagement even post-purchase, some form of marketing is involved. Its efforts in terms of brand building are designed to make long lasting impacts. Meanwhile, advertising may not even focus specifically on brand awareness. A huge difference between marketing and advertising is that the latter focuses only on specific points of the customer journey. For example, an ad created to generate leads may not necessarily be something that will initiate important conversations about the brand.

Long-Term vs. Short-Term Goals

Another noteworthy distinction in the conversation about marketing and advertising is the perspective considered. Marketing strategies are created to address long-term goals like building a solid customer base. Meanwhile, advertising is the opposite in the sense that it may only address one or a few short-term goals, such as gaining 20% more bookings. For us, the real difference between marketing and advertising is the number of short-term goals that need to be accomplished. For marketing, it will always be more.

Budget and Investment

Between marketing and advertising, marketing is the more expensive endeavor. This is mainly because of these three things.

• Long-term goals need continuous efforts, which will involve financial investments for research, content creation, relationship-building and more.
• Marketing may not be clearly tied to an income-generating endeavor.
• Since advertising is just a part of a whole, marketing is technically more investment-heavy.

Meanwhile, financial resources spent on advertising are focused on buying ad spaces on various platforms.

Are These Really All the Differences Between Marketing and Advertising?

Another point of consideration is the line of communication between the brand and its customers. Advertising is supposed to be one way. Meanwhile, marketing follows more of a feedback mechanism. This distinction between marketing and advertising doesn’t always hold true because of the developments of interactive ad formats. If there’s still a little bit of confusion when identifying marketing and advertising, try asking these questions:

• Are the efforts zeroed in on a specific short-term goal?
• Is the budget mostly dedicated to media buying?
• Are your efforts meant to move the user from one level of the customer journey to another?

If you answered yes to all of these questions, then it’s advertising!

Ads and Marketing: How Do They Work Together?

At this point, it should already be clear what the biggest differences between marketing and advertising are. For us, the existence of these distinctions is their strength! Both of these are needed to generate long-term and sustainable successes for the brand and the business. We think of marketing and advertising as something akin to nesting dolls. What you see on the outside isn’t the whole thing. You’ll need to keep digging to fully appreciate the artistry.

Remember when we provided definitions for marketing and advertising, we established that the latter was just a component of the former? To better see how the two work together, let’s think of marketing vs. advertising as strategy vs. action.

Marketing as the Framework

Marketing acts as the foundation from which great success will be built. It sets the direction of all the efforts that the company will follow in nurturing relationships and building the brand, among other things. So, between marketing and advertising, this one must come first. After all, marketing is your framework. Starting with advertising may mean you encounter issues. For example, using advertising as your foundation may go against the image you want to create for the brand in the long run.

Because advertising can derail marketing, you may be asking, are marketing and advertising the same thing? As we have clarified, they are not. However, it will never make sense to work against a bigger-picture goal.

Advertising as a Tool

What is the difference between advertising and marketing in this case? Advertising can be thought of as a hammer, while marketing is the entire house. Advertising is one of the tools that can contribute to fulfilling the longer-term goals that have been set. Looking at marketing and advertising efforts, the latter tends to be short-term. Once the goals have been met, you can move on to another campaign. You’ll notice that advertising tends to work in an endless series of starts and stops. However, this can still contribute greatly by delivering leads, profits and even increasing brand awareness.

Advertising vs. Marketing: What Are Their Roles in Business Success?

Both advertising and marketing play highly interconnected yet distinct roles in achieving success for the business. However, there are huge differences between their strategies in attaining your main business goals. To understand their roles, you just need to remember their dissimilarities. The former tends to take a more comprehensive view, working on a much longer timeline that can be a year or more. With the latter, it’s all about the things that will work right now.

Marketing’s Role in Long-Term Success

What is marketing and advertising the same in? Both of them contribute to the long-term success of the brand or business. However, the role of marketing is undoubtedly larger. With marketing, there’s a much greater focus here on the bigger picture. That’s why it involves activities that may not immediately deliver gains, such as:

• Market research;
• Building a relationship with the clientele;
• Long-term brand positioning.

When comparing marketing and advertising, have you noticed how the investments in marketing tend to be beneficial in your advertising’s success? For example, any market research can be used in multiple advertising campaigns.

Advertising’s Role in Business Growth

Between marketing and advertising, the latter is the better option if you want immediate results. As we have mentioned in the previous section, advertising can be a highly valuable tool in generating leads, driving sales and even enhancing brand awareness. That stark difference in the approach between marketing and advertising in growing a business is precisely why you need the latter. Through the financial value generated through these endeavors, there will be more capital to:

• Invest in product development;
• Hire experts to help with pricing strategy;
• Develop a clearer picture of how to distinguish the brand from the rest of the market.

So, marketing and advertising never work independently of each other. Any success achieved from advertising will contribute to any eventual long-term success.

Marketing and Advertising in Action

There’s probably no successful company today that only does well in one of the two. To achieve long-term gains, it’s important to find that balance between marketing and advertising. While the latter can provide boosts in engagement and return on investments, the former can create the foundations for even better outcomes on your short-term actions. So, it’s not a competition between marketing and advertising. As you’ll see in the following subsections, brands can (and should) excel in both!

Dove

Twenty years ago, Dove launched the Campaign for Real Beauty, shifting the focus from traditional beauty standards to celebrating diversity. Since then, the brand has been associated with self-acceptance and empowerment. Now, here’s where the difference between marketing and advertising comes in. Remember the Real Beauty sketches that went viral? The video obviously had a huge emotional impact because it showed the disparity in self-perception and how others can already see the true, beautiful you. Both are aligned with the ideas of self-acceptance, but the advertisement started a conversation that put Dove at the center of the conversation.

Samsung

Samsung is a company that creates various consumer electronics used by people worldwide. So, what efforts in terms of marketing and advertising have helped them?

• Marketing: Samsung has successfully positioned itself as a tech innovator. This means that the followers of the brand will always be the first to try what’s on offer.
• Advertising: Over the years, Samsung has been known to mock Apple in its ads, which sparks debates about which phone is better.

The scope of marketing and advertising may be different, but both of them propel the idea of Samsung as an innovator. By pointing out where Apple supposedly failed, they’re covertly saying that it’s something that they were able to address.

Disney

Disney is a multinational company that has its metaphoric fingers in a lot of pies, including retail sales and movies. So what, you may ask, are the differences in their marketing and advertising efforts?

• Marketing: Throughout the decades, Disney has successfully built an image that is nothing short of magical. They also cross-promote to bring this magic to their relatively new franchises, like Star Wars and Marvel.
• Advertising: The difference between marketing and advertising is clearer with Disney because it still invests a lot in traditional media. Over the years, it has created many memorable ads.

Addressing Common Misconceptions About Advertising and Marketing

Because these two concepts have been used interchangeably for so long, there are many misconceptions surrounding the two. That’s why there’s a whole discussion about where the line lies between marketing and advertising. So, it’s time to debunk all these myths and bring clarity once and for all. In the following subsections, we’ll cover the most common misconceptions. And to prevent any further misunderstanding about the place of marketing and advertising or the other way around, let’s start debunking.

Misconception #1: Marketing is the Same as Advertising

It’s a hard nope on that one! These two concepts work at different levels. That’s why it’s important to define advertising in marketing as a separate activity. While advertising focuses on paid promotions, marketing encompasses so much more than that. Remember that when we compared marketing and advertising, we talked about how one of their differences is its scope? Marketing is advertising PLUS so much more — that’s the distinction. We believe that the huge overlap between marketing and advertising is the reason for this confusion.

Misconception #2: Advertising Guarantees Success

It depends on what level of success we’re talking about. Comparing marketing and advertising, you’ll see that metrics of success associated with the former are supposed to be for a longer term. While it’s possible to attain success on a campaign level for advertising, you need to understand, one simply cannot work without the other. So, without a solid marketing foundation, advertising alone cannot sustain long-term growth. The contributions of marketing and advertising may not be felt right away, but no business can do without them.

Misconception #3: Marketing is Only Needed by Big Corporations

There’s no doubt that big companies have an army of top-notch marketers. But now that we understand the differences between marketing versus advertising, we hope it’s clear that even small businesses can benefit from marketing. Think of it as having a plan. You always need one if you want to ensure that every action you take can be connected to a goal. Sure, the value of advertising may be more easily seen for smaller enterprises, and when every bit of capital helps keep the company afloat, it’s understandable that a business owner will think that you can survive on advertising alone. But what’s the plan for the next few years? That’s what you need marketing for.

Marketing vs. Advertising: Should You Prioritize One Over the Other?

It’s easy to talk about how they’re both important in ensuring that the business succeeds in its short-term and long-term challenges. But sometimes, resources are severely limited. In such a case, which should you choose: marketing or advertising? The answer isn’t always black and white. It is almost impossible to implement one without at least touching on the other. After all, when defining marketing and advertising, we established that the latter is just an element of the former. But for the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that marketing is separate from advertising.

When Should You Prioritize Marketing over Advertising?

We have identified a few scenarios in which it makes more sense to focus on marketing.

• When you’re just starting out: Advertisements are rarely effective (and may even look scammy) if they’re from a brand that no one’s ever heard of before.
• When you’re looking to grow: Between marketing and advertising, the former is better for identifying what needs to be done to achieve your next goals.
• When rebranding: A solid marketing plan ensures that the transition will be smooth as the company reveals its new image.

When should you go with marketing over advertising? Any time that you really need to set up a plan, marketing should be your go-to.

When Should You Prioritize Advertising over Marketing?

Meanwhile, advertising should take up more of your resources in these scenarios.

• When you already have a solid marketing strategy: If you already have the foundations, you don’t need to focus on marketing as often. You’re ready to implement!
• When you’re launching a new product: This allows you to immediately disseminate information to your target market.
• When you want quick results: Generating leads and sales organically can take too long, and advertising lets you cut to the chase.

Think about how important it is for you to capture the attention of your audience. If you believe it takes precedence over anything else, then you’ll need to prioritize advertising.

Marketing vs. Advertising Comparison Table

Marketing vs. Advertising: They’re Two Sides of the Same Coin!

It is important to understand that marketing is focused on a macro strategy, while advertising is one of the tools you use to implement it. Still, you need to understand the difference between advertising and marketing to avoid any miscommunication, especially when working in a team setting. As part of marketing, you may also implement various modes of advertising, such as native advertising. With your understanding of marketing and advertising, let’s focus on taking action. Blend in to stand out in the right ways with MGID in your corner. Sign up for an account today and access top tools and resources. Let us help you see how marketing and advertising can work together!