Marketing versus Advertising

As a business owner, one of your business goals may be to increase sales for the upcoming fiscal year or one of your goals may be to give a little back to the community that has supported you over the years or your goals may be something in between. Whatever your goal, you know that advertising is expensive and that there are many resources available, but you don’t know how much you should spend. Should you advertise or should you market your company, product or service? There is a difference between advertising and marketing and knowing that difference can assist you in making the decisions involved in setting up and spending your budget to meet your business goals.

Marketing is the plan you will develop to bring your customers, your business, and your goals together. Marketing is the umbrella under which you will gather all of these marketing tools. Some of the tools you might consider using are advertising, market research, pricing strategy, media planning, community involvement, web-site development and so on. You know that you only have a limited amount of money to spend so you need to begin by breaking your marketing budget down into these various components. The next thing you need to do is determine how much each of these components would cost you to implement. Along with that decision, you will need to decide which tool will get you closer to your goals. Once you have a starting point, you will need to edit and revise both the tool and how much to spend on each tool, until you have determined the right mix of marketing tools that will assist your company in meeting itsr specific goals. The chart below gives an example of how your marketing budget might look.

By using a pie chart, you can better visualize your budget. You can readily see that your current marketing budget is weighed too heavily towards advertising and market research. Based on the type of business and the location of your business you might want to adjust the budget items and the priority of your budget items. If, for example, you own a small business, you might consider spending more on school, church or community involvement projects which you believe will show the community that you and your business care about the growth of the neighborhood. If you manage a larger business and/or have a larger budget, you may feel that supporting a community-wide issue is a way of giving back to the community that has supported you and your business over the years.

The reasons behind why, which resource and how much to spend are as individualistic as the number of businesses and owners. Some owners are looking for immediate return on their marketing investment, while others are looking for the biggest bang for their buck. In the current economy though, many are looking for ways to reduce their marketing budget and still maintain their presence in the marketplace. Whatever your reason or goal, just knowing that all advertising is marketing, but not all marketing is advertising should assist you in meeting those business goals. For more information on marketing and advertising differences visit:
http://www.hands-onsolutions.com/articles/advertisingvsmarketing.html
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/oct2003/sb2003109_3183_sb006.htm.