Although advertising and marketing may be the same in some aspects, there is also a distinctive difference between these two terms. The main goal of both is to enhance consumer awareness of a product or service and to form loyal target customers and increase sales.
Advertising is a paid communication or promotion about a particular product or service most especially promoting brand awareness. Its main objective is to be able to create more sales.
Marketing on the other hand is the formulation of ideas and plan to bringing closer to each other the seller and the buyer, developing, branding and designing the product or service, doing research on the target customers, advertises the features and benefits of the product or service; that is to bring an idea to the market. It is from the beginning to end of a process. It is the overall tool to build your business.
As you see, advertising is just a part of the whole marketing process. It entails planning strategies like analyzing which media to use whether through television, billboards and the like. It also includes setting the time, the duration and frequency of each advertisement. It is mainly to inform the target clients about a particular product or service. It tells the target audience of its benefits and advantages for them to be enticed to buy the product.
Marketing is the whole process itself. It is a progressive improvement process which entails various works such as product design and benefits, pricing and expected performance of the product, media planning (which includes advertising) and strategies to associate the product to the public, customer assistance systems regarding the product and a lot more.
In advertising, when the target audience already purchased the product, the purpose is already served.
With marketing however, more components are incorporated to the whole process such as market research which try to understand customer’s behavior towards a product or service that is; designing the product or service to fit into the habits of the target customers. Another is media planning which includes advertising and strategizing how to put your product or service in front of the customers and begin making sales through brand recognition. Other components are direct marketing as well as email marketing and public relations.
As you can see, advertising is just one component of marketing.