The success of a business is largely dependent on its marketing and advertising strategies. They are crucial for organizations to reach out to their potential customers. In this digital era, the way companies market themselves has completely changed. Along with traditional marketing tactics, they are using digital marketing tactics and the services of a digital marketing agency to excel.
Whether you are an apparel brand or a restaurant, a real estate dealer, or a home furnishing store, you need an online presence to be visible to your customers. Without marketing and advertising, businesses may suffer. Now that you know how important marketing and advertising are for brands, let’s have a closer look at the two.
Are Marketing and Advertising the Same?
The terms marketing and advertising are generally used interchangeably but they are not the same. They are dissimilar but still connected. Like cousins.
Advertising is the endorsement of a brand’s products and services through diverse mediums whereas marketing is a much broader concept. It is the process of identifying customers’ needs and designing comprehensive strategies to fulfill those needs. Even though both processes work toward increasing sales by enhancing the brand image, advertising is just a small part of the marketing umbrella.
Where the goal of marketing is to understand the market trends and formulate or alter products or services to present them to the target market, advertising is dedicated to how marketers present information regarding products or services to the customers. Even though both have a shared goal to increase sales to generate profits, they use different methods to achieve it.
What Is Marketing?
The American Marketing Association defines marketing as, “The process of building, communicating, and delivering products and services to provide value to customers, clients, partners, and society.”
Through research and analysis, marketers study the target market’s behaviors and generate catchy content that influences the customers to make a purchase. Marketing can be classified into two branches:
- Business-to-business (B2B)
- Business-to-consumer (B2C)
Have a look at the Marketing Mix to understand marketing better:
- Product: It is the product or service being marketed by the brand.
- Price: The monetary value or cost of the product or service under question.
- Place: The physical location where products are placed for customers.
- Promotion: The promotion strategies required to reach out to potential customers.
- People: The target market the product has been developed for.
Types of Marketing Strategies
Here are the four basic types of marketing strategies.
#1: Market Penetration Strategy
This strategy emphasizes selling current products and services to the existing customer base. By working toward increasing brand loyalty, companies make sure customers don’t switch to competitors’ products. They aim to increase sales by devising strategies to attract competitors’ customers, transform potential customers into consumers, and increase product usage.
#2: Market Development Strategy
This is the process of increasing sales by selling existing products to new markets by tapping previously untapped geographic markets. This can be done by modifying the product according to the local requirements, creating awareness through relevant promotional strategies, and formulating a new distribution channel that is suitable for the new market.
#3: Product Development Strategy
Enhancing sales by introducing new products to current customers is very common. Although product formulation is a time-taking activity, once a suitable product is developed it can be easily marketed to the consumers as the relationship already exists.
#4: Diversification Strategy
The process of presenting new products to new markets is relatively riskier than all the other strategies and takes time to become successful.
What Is Advertising?
Advertising is a small component of marketing that falls under the category of ‘promotion’. It is the process of building awareness of your company’s products and services to the target market through print media such as newspapers and magazines, broadcast media such as television and radio, digital media such as the internet, and outdoor media such as billboards and banners. Depending on the marketing plan, you can opt for a combination of these channels to reach out to your target audience.
There are three basic goals of advertising are:
- To inform,
- To influence,
- To remind.
Through advertising, businesses tend to create awareness to manipulate the customers to make an initial purchase and also to enhance repeated sales through constant reminders.
Types of Advertising Strategies
Apart from regular print, broadcast, and mobile advertising, there are other advertising strategies as well. Here are a few of them:
#1: Loyalty Programs
To reduce the cost of acquiring new customers, businesses aim to retain previous customers through several strategies such as point redemption plans, discounts on the next purchase, and so on.
#2: Contests & Sweepstakes
Brands come up with contests and sweepstakes to enlarge the customer base and improve the interaction level with customers. Under this plan, they reward the customers through contests and provide sweepstakes for product reminders.
#3: Discounts & Promotions
By presenting the product or service at a reduced price, businesses tend to boost sales for a short time. The sense of urgency encourages customers to buy.
#4: Influencer Marketing
The use of an authoritative figure to actively promote the product or service on social media or billboards to increase the follower base and subsequently, revenues is known as Influencer Marketing.
#5: Pay-Per-Click Advertising
An interesting type of online advertising is where advertisers pay every time a customer clicks on their ads. If customers look at the advertisement but don’t click on it, it doesn’t cost anything. PPC advertising is common on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
