When a company reaches out to VentraLocal, they often ask about “advertising.” It’s a common misconception that marketing and advertising are the same, however, think of advertising as just a piece of the marketing puzzle. Once you understand that, it’s much easier to comprehend the nuanced differences in terms of logistics and costs.
What’s the difference between advertising and marketing?
At the risk of oversimplifying, let’s think about it in terms of a lemonade stand when you were a kid. If you were to put an ad in the morning paper telling customers about your stand, or a sign outside your stand that says “Ice cold lemonade. 25 cents ”…that’s advertising.
Marketing is everything leading up to that ad that helps you define questions like, Who is your target market? What are their needs and how does your product or service address those needs? How do you want to drive traffic? Think of marketing as handing out free samples outside of the grocery store on a sunny afternoon and getting to know your customers.
This research will tell you how to best reach your target audience, for example, if they are more motivated to choose you if your sign says “Tart and sweet lemonade” vs “Ice cold lemonade”. Now you can market your sign to stand out in the crowd of signs, driving the customers you want right to you.
Of course today, things are a bit more complex than an ad in the local paper, and there’s a lot more that goes into running a successful business than just having a quality product. Now, when a car pulls down your street, there are lemonade stands lining both sides of the street, each holding giant neon signs claiming their lemonade is the best.
Good marketing helps you stand out from the crowd. We accomplish that through data measurement and market research to ensure you’re advertising dollars don’t go to waste.
VentraLocal helps get you the best of both.
We understand that a big part of marketing is advertising, which is why we often emphasize digital ads for our clients. However, we also want to stress that there are many more components needed to develop, create and implement your digital marketing strategy.
We provide a range of digital marketing services to make sure your brand is well-marketed. We combine web development with SEO expertise to ensure that our client’s websites are built on sound architecture, mobile-responsive and fully optimized for organic search. Then, our team creates unique content that gets added to the mix to enhance websites and advertisements, ensuring your lemonade stand has a line around a block.
