Many business owners use the terms ‘marketing’ and ‘advertising’ interchangeably, as if they both mean exactly the same thing. Although they share many similarities, ‘marketing’ and ‘advertising’ are very distinct and understanding these differences can keep your customer acquisition strategy on the straight and narrow.

Marketing is the activity most businesses will carry out before launching a new product or service in the marketplace. To market a product successfully, businesses need to have a clear understanding of their customer and their individual needs. This will include finding out what prospective customers are willing to pay for a particular product or service, who are the competitors in the market and what is the business’ unique selling point. Packaging design, company logos and anything else which helps to establish the brand will be tailored towards the target audience to increase sales.

Marketing covers a wide range of activities which includes advertising, market research, sales, public relations and customer feedback and satisfaction. Importantly, marketing isn’t a one-off activity and is more of a sustained business process which helps to nurture and strengthen the relationship your business has with new, existing and potential customers.

Advertising is an activity used to sell a product or service to the market place. At the core of advertising is a desire to raise awareness of the existence of your product or service to your target customer and how it can benefit them. How is this different from public relations, another marketing technique? Well in advertising, business owners have full control of the message disseminated to the public while in public relations, an owner only has control until the message is released to the media who then decide how they will portray it to the television, radio or newspaper audience. This can be positive or negative.

Every product is advertised differently, it’s never a one rule fits all policy. Advertising a sale for example will be totally different to advertising new stock. Advertising is usually a paid-for marketing activity and can encompass radio and television advertising, newspaper and magazines, door drops, flyers, brochures, cold calls, mail shots and web-based advertising.

Marketing should always precede advertising activity as advertising design and language will need to be geared towards the target customer. Advertising is just one part of a wider marketing plan and is usually the one which involves the most upfront investment, so naturally business owners need to get it right. Forking out thousands of pounds on advertising campaigns which provide little return is a wasted effort.

Before an advertising campaign is launched, business owners need to do their homework to find out the media channels preferred by their target customer to ensure their message is received. It’s no good advertising on social media channels when the large majority of your target customers read the local newspaper.

Nearly every business owner is familiar with what advertising is but fewer have an understanding of marketing. This can be risky when a business owner throws all his eggs into the advertising basket and forgets that other work is needed to nurture and maintain relationships with new and existing customers.

As you can see, ‘advertising’ and ‘marketing’ are really quite different and shouldn’t be used in isolation from one another. Both of these useful techniques can help grow your business but it would be useful to do some further research on how to develop a marketing strategy to ensure you use any budget you have wisely in today’s economic climate.

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