Marketing and Advertising:

If marketing is a wheel, advertising is one of its spokes.

Product development, market research, product distribution, sales strategy, public relations, and customer support are all part of marketing. Marketing is required at all stages of a company's selling journey, and it can use a variety of platforms, social media channels, and internal teams to identify their audience, communicate with it, amplify its voice, and build brand loyalty over time.

Advertising, on the other hand, is only one aspect of marketing. It is a paid strategic effort to raise awareness of a product or service as part of the larger goals outlined above. Simply put, it is not the only way for marketers to sell a product.

Here's an example (keep reading because there's a quiz at the end):

Assume a company is launching a new product and wants to create a campaign to promote it to its existing customers. This company's prefered channels are Facebook, Instagram, Google, and its own website. Every quarter, it uses all of these spaces to support its various campaigns and generate leads through those campaigns.

It publishes a downloadable product guide on its website, posts a video on Instagram demonstrating its new product, and invests in a series of sponsored search results on Google directing traffic to a new product page on its website to publicise the launch of its new product.

Which of the preceding decisions was marketing and which was advertising?

Instagram and Google were used for advertising. Instagram isn't typically used for advertising, but when used for branding, you can build a base of followers who are ready for a subtle product announcement every now and then. In this case, Google was definitely used for advertising; the company paid for space on Google through a programme known as pay-per-click (PPC) to drive traffic to a specific page focused on its product. A classic online advertisement.

Where was the marketing done? This was a trick question because marketing was the entire process. The company ran a customer-focused initiative by aligning Instagram, Google, and its own website.