Advertising vs. Marketing

When sitting down with company decision-makers, I constantly find myself battling over shifting budgets between advertising and marketing. Very few clients understand that one is not the other. What you spend on advertising versus marketing doesn’t correlate directly.

Having one budget for both or choosing one over the other is not practical. To say that advertising and marketing offer the same type of results is wrong. They both have completely different utilities.

Consider it like doing cardio vs. lifting weights. You can’t go to the gym every single day, run 10 miles, and expect your biceps to grow. Just as you can’t work out biceps six days a week and think your belly is going to shrink. One is not the other.

Now, when done together, it’s amazing! A well-thought-out and thorough marketing strategy paired with a planned advertising plan will put your business in the Olympian league. You’ll have the full package working hand in hand to get the best results.

A great example: spending $5K on a billboard on the freeway versus spending $5K on local SEO yields completely different results. Why? Because people finding you through local SEO are directly looking for your business—hence, marketing. And the people seeing your billboard are not actively looking for your business at that moment—hence, advertising.

Both have their own intrinsic values. One simply does not outweigh the other. It all depends on your goals and the results you’re looking for. Neglecting one for the other is not practical and represents bad business practices.

When cross-referencing sales or service buys for our clients and seeing where their shoppers or users come from, we can see a clear, concise difference between those who came from advertising versus marketing. We can even see changes in their spending habits, engagement, conversions, and more.

If you want to talk advertising vs. marketing and learn more about how to propel your business using the right methods, let’s talk.