Differences between sales, advertising and marketing

Your friend asked you to explain the difference between sales, advertising and marketing, are you be able to provide a confident answer?‍

If you say that you’re confused between the terms and their unique propositions, this happens more commonly than what you think.

The American Marketing Association (AMA) has redefined what sales, marketing and advertising mean for at least 3 times. To create more chaos, these definitions get refined every five years.

Think about it, can you recall the newspaper article that announced the revision in the definition of marketing? If you miss one news day, you will find yourself being outdated for, perhaps, 5 years. This is assuming you don’t miss the next paper again.

The most recent AMA approved definition of marketing tells us the following:

“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions and processes for creativity, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large.”

Last time I checked, the definition of marketing presented in most first year universities’ marketing course* is actually outdated. Yikes.

*(These are Sydney universities that I looked into).

Despite the rapidly changing landscape of marketing, I think it’s still worth breaking down the marketing definition. Why? To give you social currency!

Yeah, remember this term? Social currency a marketing jargon used in modern advertising university courses.

Anyways, …

Marketing is indeed an activity — think about it in terms of ideas, strategy, optimisation, testing, etc. They are all core marketing activities.

If you recall the concept of 4Ps back in university, you would know that marketing consists of price, product, place and promotion.

In order push our message to consumers, we would need to execute the 4Ps. That is, we would need to communicate (promotion), deliver (place) and exchange (price) our offerings (products) in a way that is creative.

By creative, I mean in the sense of delivering the 4Ps in a style that stands out from your competitors.

Now that we have marketing figured out, what is sales?

Simply put, Sales is the activity that aims to close a potential customer in making a transaction — this can be a monetary exchange or their acceptance of your idea.

Hey, take a look at this classic marketing & sales funnel. The inverted triangle.

‍For your business to remain in business, marketing should always be on the top and bottom of the funnel. Sales would be towards the end.

Marketing helps move consumers through the funnel towards a sale. Without marketing, sales is made just a lot more difficult. We have marketing post-sales to help achieve many objectives. These could be cross-selling, up-selling, turning customers into brand advocates - generating word of mouth and sharing, ensuring your consumer remembers your brand as top 3 in your product category.

How often have you seen marketing campaigns driving leads (you) towards stores? In 2020, you may or may not be conscious that you are exposed to a marketing campaign. Not everything is visual-only or text-only. For instance, your friends recommending you to visit a store is very well likely a part of a brand’s marketing campaign. And let’s guess, what do we find when we get into those stores that we are visiting? Salespeople!

They sell, upsell and cross-sell! However, this all cannot happen so seamlessly without marketing. Hold onto this, we will touch on the synergy between marketing and sales a little more in just a bit.

One easy way to maximise the synergy benefits between marketing and sales would be to use CRM marketing automation. Learn how to win customers and their loyalty at a discount today.

The final term that we wish to touch on is advertising. I wonder — what is it and where does it fit in?

Well, in essence, you can advertising (promotion) is a sub-category of marketing. Today, the terms advertising and marketing have largely been used interchangeably to mean the same time in many scenarios.

Obviously, this would also depend on the firm that you work in. After all, it is humans through which the words used and their meaning are interpreted. It is also humans whom we share this term in discussions. And, as we all know, we are all unique. Depending on who you talk to, they may or may not use the definition interchangeably to mean the same thing. However, this is not quite exactly the focus of this post.

The goal of this post to get you up to date with what sales, advertising and marketing means.

Is it wrong to call advertising, marketing? Probably not.

Is it wrong to call marketing, advertising? Well, perhaps yes. Marketing involves more than just promotion. For example, marketing also involves coming up with the creatives to address your client’s brief, writing ad copies and even bidding strategies in SEM. Bidding strategies play a role in helping to elevate a brand and its product positioning.

This is a classic scenario of how the placement of an offering (whether it be a product, service or idea) have an effect on its positioning. This is because placement is being used as a positioning strategy. In the world of SEM campaigns, such as Google ads, you will find that ad copy and keyword bidding are just two of many elements that shape consumers’ perception of the brand and its offerings. These is often overlooked by marketers, but when executed well, the return on investment can be increased by multiple folds.

Hopefully that by now you can see that, without marketing, the act of selling becomes much harder.

You can think about it like this:

How would your customer get to know your product, service or idea?

How does your customer get to know your brand?

How does your customer get to know your existence?

Marketing promotion, aka advertising, plays a role here. The other 4Ps of marketing (i.e. price, place and product) helps to facilitate the sales (closing) process to make the consumer transact with your brand.

If you are still confused — the image illustrates the difference between sales and marketing. It is also one that makes me feel kind of fuzzy!

There is no right or wrong to the two examples above. Marketing and sales complement each other, there are inherent synergies as we have discussed already. If this synergy is used effectively in digital marketing, you can see sales flying out of every competitors’ expectations.

Here at CBO, we are passionate about creating and delivering personalised ads to leads depending on where they are at in the marketing & sales funnel. We pride ourselves in consistently asking ourselves in how we can do more for our clients.

In our growing digital world, the most rewarding marketing campaigns are the ones that use a system that allows customers feel that they are being genuinely understood by the brand. This can be achieved through the delivery of super-personalised messages, made available from lead capturing, lead nurturing to driving sales. As an industry leader in marketing automation, our question for you would be, is your CRM marketing automation really ok?

One great marketer once said, “the marketing is so great — the product, service or idea sells itself.” Moving into Year 2020 and beyond, we can expect an increase in the adoption of mass personalisation by your competitors.

Don’t fall behind by staying in the world of mass advertisement that are generic. Simply personalising a name in an email is no longer sufficient.

Keen to learn more about digital marketing and how to catapult your sales strategy? Our Sydney based digital marketing agency can help by bridging marketing channel performance and automation strategy.

To learn more visit us at www.cbo.me.