Marketing vs Advertising Which Is Best To Grow Your Business

Marketing vs Advertising, what’s the difference? You have probably thought this before, and maybe you are curious as to what is better for your business marketing or advertising. Well, the reality is that they both can work together, to build your business. In this post, you’ll learn the truth behind marketing vs advertising and the advantages and disadvantages of both and how they can work synergistically together to grow your business faster!

What is marketing?

When it comes to growing your business with digital marketing, there is a big difference in how marketing works compared to advertising. Both I would argue are essential to growing your business on a large scale, but if you are just getting started, marketing might be your best bet.

I would define marketing as the content you create and put into the market place that is designed to attract traffic, leads, and customers to your business.  Most of the marketing you create is designed to be a passive activity that attracts customers to your business.

This can be things like writing blog posts, social media posts, video marketing, email marketing, etc. Marketing like this also shouldn’t be confused with active prospecting. Active prospecting is when you are personally selling your products or services.

You do this active prospecting by networking, building your audience, and having one on one conversations with people. I think this aspect of growing your business is essential, especially in the beginning, because the marketing side of things takes time to gain some traction.

Most people who utilize content marketing in their business, are not going to create a piece of content that goes viral. The reality is, that success from marketing takes time and consistent effort. Eventually, all of your content can have a compound effect and your passive marketing could eventually replace your active prospecting efforts.

What is advertising?

Advertising is very similar to marketing but it functions a bit differently. I define advertising as paying to display your marketing in front of targeted audiences in hopes that they take action on your offers.

Now advertising can be used in a lot of different ways. You could use advertising to drive traffic to content, a landing page to get leads, or even send it directly to your sales page. You could also use advertising to view a promotional video, engage with your content, sign up as a lead, and more.

In a general sense, you use advertising to send paid targeted traffic to whatever you see fit. Typically advertising can get you faster results in your business because you are paying to send traffic to your content, rather than letting that happen organically as with marketing.

There are a lot of different kinds of advertising as well. You could do offline advertising, like TV ads, billboards, newspaper ads, direct mail, and more. While these methods can work, often the targeting is nowhere near as sophisticated as marketing online or digital marketing.

With digital advertising, you are able to choose a much higher targeted audience to send your marketing to. This can often lead to lower ad spend costs, and often a higher ROI on your ad spend.

So which is better when it comes to marketing vs advertising?

The reality is, it depends. It depends on your marketing goals, marketing budget, and the time frame you are looking to achieve results. A lot of business owners have improper expectations with the results they can achieve with both marketing and advertising.

Most people don’t realize that both have a learning curve. Marketing and advertising are both a combination of art and science. There are certain principles that are going to be universal in both, but then at the same time, you develop a 6th sense over time of what works as you go through your learning curve.

Plus, when it comes to advertising vs marketing, both are going to have advantages and disadvantages, and they often need to be combined together in order to achieve the maximum growth in your business.

Most businesses just starting out, don’t have a huge marketing budget, and this is normal. Typically as your business grows, so do your profits, and this allows you to invest more into paid advertising.

I look at marketing as more of the “hustle” side of growing your business. If you have the time, you can continue to utilize content marketing, to build a solid foundation of traffic, leads, and sales, which can pay for your advertising to scale in the future.

The advantages of marketing vs advertising

If you are just starting a business I typically recommend that you start promoting your business with a combination of marketing and active prospecting. The advantage that marketing has over advertising is that the work you do on your marketing can pay you returns for years to come.

When you run paid advertising you can get immediate traffic, however, when you stop paying for advertising, the flow of traffic stops. When you invest your time on marketing, like creating blog posts, or making videos on YouTube, that effort can continue to drive traffic and leads into your business potentially forever.

The reason I suggested that you combine marketing with active prospecting and networking is that marketing takes time to gain traction. I wish I could tell you that you could write a piece of content today and tomorrow it will go viral and reach a million people, but that’s not reality.

However, when you build that solid marketing foundation, it can work for your business 24/7. This means while you are busy running every other aspect of your business, your marketing can continue to work to bring in new clients.

I look at marketing like each piece of content you create acts as a billboard advertising your business. You could create one billboard like a home page of your website, but not many people are going to see it. If you create hundreds of pieces of content over time, it is like having your billboard on every street corner, and it can lead to a lot of free exposure to your business.

Understand the targeting behind advertising

As I mentioned earlier, one of the huge benefits of advertising is that it can be turned on and off as a method to drive targeted traffic to your offers. The foundation of this ability is knowing who your ideal customer actually is.

If you don’t have a good idea of your ideal customer avatar, or basically the overall characteristics of your ideal customer, you will have a hard time targeting your ads.

When you market to everyone, you are really marketing to no one. Share on X

A lot of people make this mistake when they advertise their business. I’m sure you have great products or a great service, because why would you be in business if you didn’t?

Even with that being the case, not every single person out there is your ideal customer. When you try and appeal your messaging and offers to everyone, you won’t be on point for your ideal customers and the people who will actually buy from you.

If you don’t understand this principle of advertising, you will end up losing a lot of money. Marketing takes a long time to start gaining traction, but with advertising, you can start seeing results quickly. At the same time, with advertising you are spending money to make this happen, marketing you are usually spending time.

If you don’t have a lot of time, and you have excess cash, running paid advertising could be a great option for you.

Start with marketing and add in paid advertising later on

Don’t get me wrong, there are a time and a place for advertising your business, but it usually isn’t in the beginning. You might wonder why, and the main reason again comes back to the learning curve involved in it.

Advertising is really an accelerated method of getting traffic to your marketing. So, with this in mind, if you don’t have a solid understanding of marketing, or if marketing that you have in place isn’t converting, sending paid traffic to it is just going to waste your money.

The last thing you want to have happen is to waste all of your money on advertising and not see any returns on your investment. For this reason, it’s best to start with marketing vs advertising and to start getting results organically through your marketing, and from there move into advertising.

The best way to use advertising to grow your business is to scale what is already working. Certainly, testing and tracking and continual improvement are going to be a part of advertising either way, but you might as well start with a foundation of something that is working organically.

Use this marketing strategy before you start running paid ads

There is a proven 3-step process to an effective marketing strategy. The 3 steps are building your audience, engaging your audience, and then selling to your audience. When you follow this 3-step marketing strategy it’s pretty hard to fail in your business.

You can have the best content marketing in place to promote your business, but if no one sees it, it doesn’t matter. This is why building your audience is incredibly important. Building your audience can consist of growing your social media following on various platforms.

Once you have that following built up, you want to send them content that engages with them. This means you use content marketing to help solve their problems, answer their common questions, or to help them achieve results faster.

When you follow that process it makes the 3rd step of this marketing strategy of selling so much easier. Building your audience and engaging with that audience can create a huge pool of people that knows, likes, and trusts you, and that sees your business as a credible expert in the industry.

Selling to a market that knows and trusts you, makes your conversion rate much higher. In addition to this, once you have this market established from your marketing, you can further take advantage of it as the basis of your advertising strategy.

Using your marketing to get even better results with advertising

You’ve probably heard that there is a lot of value in running Facebook ads for your business. Well, this is very true, but a huge reason for this is the ability to create custom audiences and to use it for remarketing your business.

Let’s start with building custom audiences. A custom audience is building a special group that you are going to target with your advertising. Why this is important because targeting is almost everything in advertising.

If you put the right marketing message in front of the right people at the right time, your advertising can be successful. So how do you get your message in front of the right people at the right time? That’s where building the custom audience comes into play.

Installing a Facebook pixel on your website is the foundation of this. When you install a Facebook pixel, you can start to gather valuable data on people interacting with your marketing efforts.

For example, if you have a blog post that is specifically catered to your ideal customers and a high percentage of those people end up becoming a lead or buying from you, wouldn’t you want to reach more people just like that visitor? Well, that’s exactly what the data from a Facebook pixel and building a lookalike audience from that custom audience can do!

If you’ve followed the 3-step marketing strategy above you probably have a big list of leads and customers that you can also use to build a lookalike audience from to use for paid advertising.

Check out this post on running Facebook advertising for a small business to learn more.

Use advertising to scale your business online

Now that you have a targeted audience to run your advertising to, and a solid marketing foundation that is converting organically in place, it’s time to start scaling your business. Using paid advertising to scale your business is the best way to use advertising.

As I said you want marketing and advertising to work synergistically together. Marketing is like starting the fire and laying the foundation, advertising is like pouring gasoline on the fire to make it burn faster and bigger.

When it comes to marketing, you only have so much time in the day. You can only create so many pieces of content to promote your business each day. Marketing does have the advantage of working for your business passively but it does cost you time to actually make the content.

Paid advertising just costs you money. Advertising takes some time to set up correctly. However, once it’s set up it can run on its own to drive traffic, leads, and sales. This makes it the perfect marketing strategy to scale your business.

For example, you might have spent several hours creating a landing page, lead magnet, and sales funnel that converts well organically. At this point, you can wait around for leads and sales to come in or you can run paid advertising to drive traffic to those offer faster to scale your growth.

This is the power of paid advertising and why it works so well. Also, why I suggest to implement it when you have your marketing foundation in place first.

You need to implement testing and tracking in both marketing and advertising

Testing and tracking your advertising data is essential to optimizing your results.

What you measure and track you can improve. Share on X

Testing and tracking is something that doesn’t change in marketing vs advertising, you need to do it in both. A strategy that can work well for both is called A/B testing.

A/B testing is when you send traffic to two versions of the same offer and see which one performs better. You might send people to two different landing pages, two different offers, or even two different color schemes.

This A/B testing marketing strategy is not just a one time process either.  You need to be doing this on a continual basis to constantly improve your marketing and advertising. Doing this lets you know what is working and not working. This is crucial because if you are putting advertising dollars towards marketing that doesn’t convert, you will lose money.

Following this testing and tracking process also can help you discover important marketing metrics that can further improve your business.

Metrics to know when you implement a paid advertising strategy or invest in marketing

Marketing and advertising your business without knowing your metrics is like trying to play a sport without knowing the score. There’s no way to improve or win the marketing game if you don’t know your metrics.

With that being said, there are a few marketing metrics you need to know in both marketing and advertising.

• Click through rate = Clicks/Impressions
• Lead Conversion Rate = Leads/Visitors
• Conversion Rate = Customers/Leads
• Average Value Per Sale
• Average Customer Lifetime Value
• Value Per Lead = (Average Value Per Sale X Conversion Rate)
• Lifetime Value Per Lead = (Average Lifetime Value Per Customer X Conversion Rate)

These metrics are essential to know. When you know these marketing metrics it can help you to understand when your marketing investment is profitable. For example, let’s say you know that the average value per lead is worth $10. That means you can afford to spend up to $10 per lead and worse case, break-even at the cart.

When you are breaking even at the cart, it means you are essentially advertising for free. From there, anything beyond the first initial sale is profit for your business. This is an extremely good spot to be in for your business. The only way you can get there is to know your marketing metrics. By knowing and following the marketing and advertising strategies listed above you’ll be on your way to success.

Overall, when you are deciding on marketing vs advertising in your business, they both matter and should be used together to maximize the success in your business!

Marketing and advertising can be complicated. Instead of trying to figure out how to implement marketing vs advertising, just hire us to do it for you! Click here to fill out a quick survey about your business to see how we can help you with your marketing and advertising.

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Mike MacDonald

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