Marketing vs Advertising

Before we get into explaining what a marketing plan is, it is important to know the difference between advertising and marketing.

In short, advertising is a component of marketing. Marketing encompasses advertising plus many other aspects of how your company relates it's customers.

The longer explaination would be to give the definitions of advertising and marketing and point out the differences. Well, we all know what advertising is. We see it everyday when watching tv, or on the billboards when going to work. Advertising is simple, it's a  message paid for by a company to promote it's product or service.

As mentioned, marketing incorporates all advertising that a company does, but it also includes all the research and strategies that went into determining what that advertising will be.

Other components of marketing are a company's public relations, it's branding, and basically any other type of communications that a company has with any potential and existing customer.

For example, business cards would not neccessarily be considered advertising, but they would fall under the marketing umbrella.

The over arching idea of marketing is that there is a coherent method (based on research) that guides all communications. So before any advertising takes place, it is important that a marketing strategy be considered and followed.

So you can see that the difference between advertising and marketing is important to understand. If you go about blindly placing ads hit or miss in various medias, you will never achieve the same results than if you had a complete marketing plan in place to guide your decisions.

This is the third article in our marketing plan tutorial basics section, continue reading the next article below.