Digital Marketing vs Digital Advertising
Comparison based on a fake brand of socks
Ever wondered what’s the difference between marketing and advertising? Let me try to explain it on a brand I have made up. Bare with me, it’ll be fun!
First, the BRAND
To talk about the topic of anything digital, we first need a brand that uses digital to its advantage. For this example, we will use a simple brand for custom socks called “SockIt” (Not a reference for any existing brand with the same or similar name).
SockIt is a brand that designs, creates, and distributes custom socks all around the world. It’s the perfect brand for anybody that wants to stand out in a cool and different way.
- It is a brand that wants to be a part of your life.
- It wants you to think of it as your friend.
- It is environmentally friendly, and very quality oriented while being open about its practices.
- Its mission is simple: “Make the world less black and white.”
- It communicates with its customers via social media (Facebook and Instagram), as well as its blog
- Target audience: 18–35
A quick comparison between DM and DA
Are we ready?
1. Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a big chunk to explain in simple terms, that’s why I will show through our brand.
Let’s say we are launching a new set of socks designed by an up-and-coming artist called “Artisto”.
The socks are ready and there is a lot of them. More than 50 designs are ready to be shipped. How do we approach this?
Since we’re talking from a DM standpoint, the first thing to do is research!
Research is the fundamental part of any worthwhile marketing endeavor that we want to succeed. Research can be done in many ways, but the easier ones are through desk research or a questionnaire. By doing our research, we will be able to better understand and target the right audience with the right message.
Let’s say that we found out that young people from the age of 18–25 are more likely to follow an artist’s work. We also found out that people between the ages of 20–30 are the most likely ones to buy clothing designed by an artist. After the first part of the research is done, it’s time for the game plan. We want to target people between 18–30, while mostly focusing on the ones between 20–25. We need to find out how and where to approach them. Time for the second wave of research. The process continues throughout the whole campaign. When we get the results from the second wave, we will be ready to make some content and organize the campaign based on a set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals.
All of this is pretty simplified but it will make it easier to understand.
Let’s say the research made it clear that we should use Instagram and Facebook. A blog is a nice edition for anybody that wants more info or wants to engage more with the brand. We will use Instagram for the reels, feed posts, and stories and Facebook for posts. On both platforms, we need ads, but that comes later.
The main thing now is to organize the customer journey. In layman’s terms, a customer journey is all actions the customer takes between being aware of a brand and buying a product from that brand — even after. This part is very important because it will weave the whole communication strategy of the campaign. A big part of customer journey research is making personas. A customer persona is a fictional person based on research, made to represent a perfect customer for a product. It can also be a negative persona, or the person least likely to buy a product.
One of the key parts I haven’t mentioned before, and for a good reason, is budgeting. The budgeting process is a complex part of the strategy because based on the funds at our disposal we need to be able to pull everything off. For our example, we’ll say we have unlimited funds but only for digital!
Let’s say we created our personas. Now is the time to put all our work into action. From creating content based on research, posting it according to everything we strategized, and finally advertising.
2. Digital Advertising
After all that strategizing and researching it is finally time to step into the world of advertising.
Let’s play this out with SockIt!
After the strategy, comes execution. This is advertising. With SockIt we are now in the part where we start our ads. We will use the content we made in the first part and adapt it to the formats and communication needs of our advertising tools.
Since the research showed that Instagram and Facebook are the way to go, we will use Facebook Manager to make, target, and distribute ads around the two platforms. Since we are going by the customer journey we made, a key part is to capture their attention everywhere they go. That means we need to use Google Ads. Google Ads is a platform we use to capture people’s attention all around google products. If you are scrolling through the web, browsing YouTube, or trying to find something on Google Maps, chances are you’re being shown targeted ads. It’s a bit more complicated but the main point is that Google Ads is a targeting machine! With it, we complete the whole story of our advertising strategy and bring the customers to our website more than we could do just by using Facebook and Instagram.
Conclusion
Depending on the product, you will either use one or a combination of both. The tools at your disposal are very good at doing their job, you just need to know what that job is. Remember that research is the key part of any successful campaign and if left out, you will NOT reach your goals.
Research, set goals, strategize, test, improve — that is your formula for success.
