The differences between digital advertising and digital marketing:
1. Digital advertising is a subset of digital marketing:
The definitions and types of digital advertising/marketing make one thing clear: digital advertising is a subset of digital marketing. It’s just one aspect of it. When you want to market in a digital channel you need to begin with the business idea. When you share the business idea with an expert, you’re involved in marketing – not advertising. The product idea, product creation, packaging, pricing, finding the target audience, defining marketing segments, are all the essential parts of your business marketing strategy.
Digital advertising comes into play when you use the internet to advertise your products or services or business or brands — that’s when you use one of the three types of digital advertising discussed above to promote your products or to generate traffic. Digital advertising is one part of the digital marketing amongst several others. The purpose of all the marketing techniques is to generate traffic so you can choose any tactic that will grow your business. It could be SEO or PPC or both.
2. Digital marketing is a process while digital advertising is an activity:
Digital marketing is a process that begins from the moment you choose the name of your business or even before that. The process is continuous and never-ending. It starts from the market research phase and moves all the down to control and refining stage and the data from refining stage is then used again for research and to create a new marketing strategy.In a nutshell, everything that you do online or share online is part of your business digital marketing process and strategy.
Digital advertising, on the other hand, is an activity in the entire digital marketing process. A digital advertiser needs input from the digital marketer in the form of what to promote, when to promote, what the advertising budget is, etc. The marketer will then create ads to send traffic to a landing page. It’s just a tiny activity in the entire digital marketing process.
3. Digital advertising is tactical while digital marketing is strategic in nature:
The strategy is the plan that might be complex and often involves decision-making, patterns, and several activities while the tactic is the means used to obtain the desired goal.
Digital advertising is tactical in nature. It defines how you’ll promote the product or an offer to the target audience. It has a short time frame and can be easily replicated.
On the other hand, digital marketing is strategic in nature. In fact, it’s deeply rooted in your business strategy. It involves:
This strategy marketing plan has the potential longerity and is not easily replicated.
4. Digital advertising creates brand awareness while digital marketing develops the brand:
The purpose of digital advertising is to promote the brand or generate sales. An advertisement is defined as a promotional message to sell a product. In the case of digital advertising, it is more related to traffic generation. In all the cases, advertising is either used to promote a brand, a product or a service, or an idea.
On the other hand, marketing is used to develop a brand image and how your target audience perceives your brand when they see a logo or hear about your brand. The image is developed by digital marketing.
Digital marketing is strategic in nature, therefore, a carefully-crafted strategy will help build a brand as compared to digital advertising that will only give a slight push to sales or brand awareness.
5. Digital advertising is sales-focused while digital marketing is focused on audience psychology:
Digital marketing on the otherhand is not always intended to drive sales. Though the ultimate objective is to increase sales and maximise revenue, especially with personalised message, but the path that is used to achieve this objective is fairly different. For instance, you have to conduct market research to understand your target audience and to figure out the demand for your product. Similarly, when you write and publish a blog post, the purpose is to build a relationship with your readers.
This is what makes digital marketing audience psychology-focused.
The first step of the digital marketing process is to understand your target audience and create buyer personas. This cannot be achieved by understanding audience psychology.
The similarities between digital advertising and digital marketing
Despite all the differences discussed above, there are quite a few similarities between the two.
1. The ultimate goal is to increase revenue:
The objective of digital advertising is to boost sales in short-term while the objective of digital marketing is to boost sales in long-term. The approach used is different but the ultimate goal is to increase revenue. The approach to increasing revenue by generating sales is different. In the case of digital advertising, ads are used to drive instant sales. Businesses exist to earn revenue.
Digital marketing is time-consuming and you need to set clear goals to achieve great results. It doesn’t focus on short-term sales rather the idea is to focus on business growth by focusing on building customer relationships. Digital marketing ROI is consistent and huge as compared to that of digital advertising. Though, it may take some time before you start to see results.
2. Digital advertising and digital marketing are linked:
Digital advertising can’t be done in isolation. The data for running an advertising campaign is provided by the digital marketing strategy such as buyer personas, campaign objective, landing page, lead magnet, core product, conversion funnel, etc.
Since digital advertising is part of the overall marketing, therefore, it has to be linked to the strategy in some way.
Digital marketing can exist without digital advertising. For instance, you can stick to content marketing and SEO for reaching your target audience. In this case, you’ll not have a digital advertising campaign but the marketing campaign will continue to work.
Here’s a list of reasons when you should use digital advertising.
1. Drive sales and Boost ROI
2. Digital Creative Lift Brands
3. Reach your Target Audience
4. Increase the ROI of other media
5. Drive instant Traffic
I hope this article was helpful for you to understand that both Advertising and Marketing are two different but related terms and when you should use the Digital Advertising for your business.
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