Difference Between Advertising and Promotion

Although, putting advertising and promotion under the same manager’s work belt works well for most of the smaller businesses, but what if your business’s wingspan is a lot wider than that single manager can’t handle it. That’s why at times, it becomes quite important to differentiate the concept of advertising from promotion and vice versa. In fact, this differentiation helps a brand in a long run to keep its successful techniques up and running, even if it is a smaller level business.

Advertising and Promotion Definition 

To help you get a clear image of each in your mind, let’s start with the basic definition of both. Generally, marketers refer advertising as to be the way of putting paid but controlled messages in the media for getting the word for your brand out in the market. On the other hand, promotion is supposed to include both paid and free activities for marketing, or for getting sales or even, sponsorship.

Well! That’s the narrowest definition about it (as far as we expect) and we hope that has helped you in getting an idea of what these things actually look. So now, it’s time to move beyond basics and get detailed difference concepts among both.

1. Time Period

Time is one of the key factors that can help one in discriminating between these advertising and promotion. Since, advertising is meant to spread your word using ads (most of the time), so the time for which the company keeps it in execution mode is longer as compared to promotion, which, in contrary to this, makes use of dynamic ways for the purpose of generating more revenue by announcing anything special about your product like new offer, coupon, contests, free samples and much more.

2. Price

Definitely, price is that primary factor on which your decision, in making the choice among both of these two, lies.  Advertising, most often, just consists of paid ads, therefore, it is a lot costly while the promotion is both paid and free. So, that free part is what makes it cost less as compared to advertising. Moreover, the paid part of it is also not that bad as is supposed to be.

3. Suitability

In terms of suitability, advertising is meant to be the best partner of medium to large scale businesses. Since, if smaller businesses had to use it, they would have often ended up losing a lot more revenue than they would have been generating. But still, it is up to that thinking body of that brand that decided to which strategy they would like to go with.

Promotion, contrarily, is suited best for businesses that belong to medium to a smaller size. Its flexibility of switching from paid to free tools any time is what makes it desirable to lower level companies.

4. Sales Generation

This part of the advertising and promotion comparison consists of the assumptions that are supposed to be related closely to the brand’s success in getting a huge customer base. The main objective of advertising is to let the people know that a particular brand exists, but it doesn’t tell them that what keeps that brand apart from its competitors. On the other side, promotion is a direct relation to sales. In fact, the main idea of promotions, itself, is gathering that huge customer base that takes the business to next level while making its customer that medium of getting more.

5. Speed

In terms of speed, promotion is a clear winner for everyone ranging from smaller businesses to the multinational brands. In comparison to expectations, promotion achieves the result in a relatively shorter period of time, since it targets the weaker points of the market and transforms them to be the strongest for the brand’s cause.

Advertising, in contrary to this, is slower since it is not that much targeted towards the idea of generating sales in comparison to the tactics, to let the people know about a certain brand. So, it does not transform that knowledge of existence into sales because of its relatively weaker call to action property. That’s why it is slower as compared to promotion.

6. Purpose

As mentioned earlier, the main point of application is what determines the clear winner among advertising and promotion. For an already established business, promotion prevails since it is meant to give the number of sales an enormous boost while advertising is supposed to do both of these for the brand, brand building as well as customer attraction and that’s what a new business needs, even if it is already established somewhere else but is new to a particular market.

Types of Advertising and Promotion   

Well! That difference is not just in terms of properties that both of these, advertising and promotion hold, but also the types, which exist on each side. Promotion can be of two types whereas advertising can go beyond this limit twice the time than this and that counts up to four.

Types of Advertising

1. Internet Advertising

The all in one ultimate tool, for putting the idea of advertising to work, is the internet. Email advertising has finally replaced the formal mail in most of our daily life and that’s what gives the companies an enormous chance to do what they want the customers to do. Well! It just doesn’t end here at emails but there are a hundred other options too, like websites, blogs, digital ads, etc. In fact, that’s where the game begins.

2. Convert Advertising

In covert advertising, the subject company embeds the usage of its product to a particular entertainment program like an actor wearing or using the product during most of the movie acts or a drama or something like that.

3. Media

Advertising a product commercially often involves television commercial in it along with other means of advertisements like billboards, paintings, flyers, business cards, radio ads, web banners, bus stop benches, road signs, calendars, and anything that can have a poster on it. These all means are actually known as advertising media.

Types of Promotion

1. Above the line Promotion

Thanks to media, a brand is able to get what it wants to get by making it be the one and only contributor to the brand’s success.

2. Below the line Promotion

Any other method of promoting a product, that a brand can employ, belongs to below the line production. The major contributing parts to this kind of promotion are trade shows, personal selling, direct mail, merchandising, endorsements, sponsorship, public relations, sales promotion as well as product placement.