An expansion is one of the primary goals of every business. It is a fact that for businesses, profitability should be present in order for that goal to be met. There are two essential things to attain a high level of business competency. They are marketing and advertising. These two are vital and critical to success. However, they have big differences that will either make or break a business if they are not properly balanced. Let’s take a look at the roles of Marketing and Advertising.
Advertising
Advertising is a way of communication of the business to its consumers. Its main role is to drive more consumption of the business’ products and services to generate more profit and income. The most popular way of advertising is through branding. This is achieved by making the consumers associate the qualities, traits and characteristics of the products and services into their minds. The key to branding is persuasion and education, making the consumers more aware that the product or service exists.
There are different forms of advertising. Let me show you a list of traditional forms:
- Newspaper advertising
- Radio Advertising
- Television advertising
- Billboard advertising
There are also new forms of advertising which are infomercials, combining traditional commercial and consumer education and street advertising which is about promoting awareness on the streets. Another new form is online advertising. This online advertising is all about placing banners, text ads, and video ads on different websites. There are also many other new forms of advertising. This includes mobile ads, personalized shirt and jacket prints and much other more.
In advertising, businesses can devise a lot of creative ways to catch customer attention and brand retention. Practically, every form of media can be used to increase product and service awareness.
Marketing
As opposed to advertising, marketing is very different on a lot of terms. Marketing is a more scientific approach. It involves a lot of experimentation and analysis. It includes ongoing improvement of methods of increasing product sales and profitability while keeping the costs low. In addition, it also studies on what keeps the consumers satisfied with the products and services.
Marketing is also constantly changing. Examples of early approach would be production orientation, product and selling orientation to the more complex contemporary marketing which includes online marketing. It is always changing adapting to different consumer needs and technological advancements.
Measuring Profitability and Success
There is a story between marketing and advertising. Advertising is like throwing all the bait in the river while waiting for the catch to arrive. On the other hand, marketing is testing different baits, checking the temperature of the water to get more catch. This logic is true. Marketing is all about measuring out which works and eliminating which does not, while advertising relies more on the blanket approach and does not necessarily have the numbers to explain its effectiveness. Constructively, businesses can use a good balance of the two functions to measure profitability and success.
It does not mean that the blanket approach of advertising is not always working and the logical and analytical approach to marketing is the other way around. Remember, advertising works to educate the consumers and embed in their minds that the product is existing and what it is all about. Marketing measures out if this advertising is effective and move on to methods on how to improve consumer satisfaction and improvement of the return-of-investment. Balance is always the key to achieve a long-term business growth.
