Marketing Trap #91: Believing that Marketing and Advertising Are the Same Thing

From 99 Marketing Traps and How to Avoid Them*

Marketing is a discipline that seeks to understand and leverage how and why buyers buy.

Advertising is how you get a persuasive message out to the people who are most likely to be your buyers, and not the only way.

The marketing manager who focuses mostly on advertising is severely limiting his arsenal of marketing communications advantages.

This is especially true today when the Internet provides access to so many opinions other than the one you can present in your advertising.

Advertising does provide you with the advantage of being able to control the message that goes out, but what about all the other messages going out there in the press and through social media outlets? And what happens when the buyer’s experience with your brand doesn’t match up with the promises of your advertising?

Once, a long time ago, you might have been able to get away with that kind of disconnect by continuing to reach out to new prospects while your buyer victims remained unknown, but no longer.

How to Rescue a Brand that Has Fallen Into This Trap:

For your advertising efforts to succeed, they must be in alignment with all other aspects of your brand and the experience it provides. Public relations, social media and buyers’ experience with the brand at every point of brand contact all carry more weight today than your advertising alone.

Advertising does give you more message control and a more immediate return on investment when it is used as a direct response vehicle, but you need to understand and utilize advertising as just one part of a marketing mosaic.

*Available now from Amazon.