Branding, marketing, and advertising are all tools you can utilize for your business to help promote it. They can help you acquire and retain customers, as well as drive sales and profits. These tools are all closely connected in purpose, and work alongside another, thus one can easy get each tool confused. Understanding the differences between branding, marketing, and advertising can help you develop an edge for your business and maximize the effectiveness of each tool.
Branding is what your company is about, why it exists, and how your clients and potential clients feel about your business and its products. Branding is what promotes loyalty and long-term commitment to ones business. The visual components of your brand include your company name, logo, tagline, fonts, and color scheme. These elements identify your brand and create an association in people’s minds between their desires and beliefs and your company’s ideals. The most important element to branding is how a business services each customer. Better service enhances your brand more than anything.
Marketing is about the development of strategies to build awareness of your company’s products and services. It involves the promotion and the enforcement of protecting your brand. Every message about your company is part of your marketing. This includes your social media interactions, customer service, personal relationships, printed materials, websites, social media profile pages, and anything that contains your business imagery.
Advertising is a subset of the marketing tool that is focused mainly on acquiring customers and to drive sales. This mainly relates to paid advertising campaigns that are engineered to reach a target audience through various media, including on a website, newspapers, magazines, posters, television, and radio.
Branding, marketing, and advertising are tools you can utilize that work together side by side. Developing great relationships and partnerships within your market is essential for your brand. Keep in mind when you are hiring be sure to align new employees with the company vision and mission. Businesses that consistently and efficiently investing in training talent alignment with their brand and strategy outperform their competitors. The most important tool of the three is branding. There are many businesses out there and many we have consulted that their branding is everything. They do not need social media or a major web presence. The marketing is more one-to-one with their customers and how they perform that service to them.
