Digital advertising vs. digital marketing - what are they and what are the differences?

New technologies and the digital era have led us to adapt traditional media and strategies to digital ones, which has led to the creation of new terms that are very similar and end up being confused with each other. In this post we will define what digital marketing is and what digital advertising is, thus seeing the differences that exist between the two.

what is digital advertising?

Being clear about the differences between the two concepts will help us to lead our company on the road to success. Knowing the difference between the two, we will be able to understand which strategy is best for our company or how to combine them in order to grow.

When we talk about digital advertising, we are referring to all the existing ways of publicising a brand, its products and services through digital devices and channels. This appears at the moment when users start to use the internet for everything, from searching for information to making any purchase. That is why more and more, all companies are doing everything possible to have a presence on the internet, if your audience is there, you must be there.

Benefits of digital advertising

1. Reach
   Increasingly, everyone is on the internet, we can communicate with our neighbour and with someone who lives on the other side of the world, our reach through the internet is instantaneous to anywhere in the world, which means that digital advertising increases the reach of the company, not only to make your brand known, but also to sell.
   
   
2. Flexibility
   

   You can create an advert in a matter of minutes, you can even update it and modify it to your liking in a very short time. This was unthinkable for traditional media, to make even the slightest change, you have to change practically the entire strategy, which means very high costs.

3. Segmentation
   We have to know who our service or product is aimed at, as having the possibility of segmenting the market we are targeting is essential in order to get as many potential customers as possible.
   
   
4. Communication
   Another of the great advantages of digital advertising is to be able to convert the receiver into the sender, we will have a feedback that is key to know the opinion of customers with your brand. In addition, these responses that we receive can be obtained immediately, so we will have everything well managed and controlled.
   
   
5. Effectiveness
   This medium is much more effective, we can reach many more users and many more potential customers than with traditional advertising, this, of course, taking into account that we have to create content for users that is valuable and innovative.
   
   
6. Reliability
   

   Thanks to segmentation, users are more and more willing to open promotional emails, as the advertising that reaches them is from brands that interest them, what they want is to know their offers and promotions in order to consume, social networks are considered a new channel in which responses are always active, there is a two-way communication between the brand and customers.

7. Measurable
   Thanks to tools such as Google Analytics, which is also a free tool, advertising processes are accurate and provide us with data that help us to optimise or improve our resources within our digital advertising strategy.

So, what is digital marketing?

We call digital marketing the set of strategies that are carried out to promote a brand on the internet. We can say that marketing deals with the 4 P's of marketing, which are: Price, product, place and promotion. All of these are designed for the online environment. Therefore we can see that advertising is a tool of online marketing, as it is within one of the P's of marketing, promotion. This is why the terms are so confused, since digital advertising is a tool of digital marketing itself.

A digital marketing strategy can be defined as a set of actions that are taken to reach a specific objective, these are some of the actions that are carried out when implementing a marketing strategy:

• Define your buyer persona: The most important thing in a marketing strategy is to know who we are targeting, if you know who your ideal customer is, you will know everything else, what kind of content they are interested in, on what platforms and formats, at what times, etc.
• Digital presence: It is very important to know what opinion there is of your company, and for this you have to have a digital presence that represents you as you are.
• Marketing plan: It is necessary to consider how the strategy will be executed and what actions will be carried out to do so.
• Create relevant content: The content you publish to attract your buyer persona should be valuable content that not only attracts them, but also educates and guides them on how to act at each stage of the buying cycle.

can the two be used in tandem then?

We already know that digital advertising is only a part of digital marketing, after knowing this, there is a strategy within B2B marketing that consists of a set of actions that are divided into three stages: attract, educate and convert users into leads. And of these, in which phase does advertising comes into play? Very easy, advertising comes into play in the phase of attracting visitors, through different ads, mostly placed on facebook, instagram and google.

The important thing after having a good content strategy is to achieve that these reach your target audience, which we will achieve through the previously mentioned ads. Thanks to everything you have generated by creating your buyer persona, you will have enough information to be able to create the best content within the three stages of the buying cycle. Digital advertising is basically the ads that we will launch for your target audience to make a decision. So digital advertising will be working together with digital marketing.

So if you want to understand digital marketing better, digital marketing is a vehicle and digital advertising is the fuel that makes it move. They both seek a common goal which is to sell.