The Difference Between Branding and Marketing

Posted on: April 12th, 2021

What is the Difference Between Branding & Marketing

Every company should focus on branding and every company should focus on marketing. Are they the same terms though? Not entirely, but close enough that it’s easy to get them mixed up, especially if you’re new to both concepts.

What is Marketing

Generally speaking, marketing is the effort is made to get the word out about your company. It’s figuring out which outlets are best to connect with your past, present, and future customers. Do you buy ads to reach them in newspapers and magazines? Do you buy TV or radio commercials? Do you crank out social media posts or banner ads on various channels?

Marketing can include other efforts to let people know about your products and services, like sponsoring a local community event or sending out press releases.

It also can include behind the scenes efforts like evaluating past or current campaigns to figure out which methods found stronger results. Digital channels and email management tools make it considerably easier to look at who is seeing your message, especially when compared to past research methods which involved a lot of guesswork.

As part of marketing efforts, company officials can incorporate their budget to figure out how much to spend on tasks like print ads, Facebook ads, analytic keywords, and other outreach methods.

What is Branding

Branding, on the other hand, is less about how you inform/entertain/persuade customers to spend money with you, and more about what you present to them. Branding represents all the elements that make your company successful and unique, which is useful when directly compared to any competition.

Good branding can dive deep, like the unique colors, shapes, or fonts used in the official company logo. It can also become philosophical when discussing how brand-building can defining the company’s values.

Reaching Your Optimal Audience

Once all of the elements of a company’s brand are established, marketing can get involved in communicating this information with the optimal audience.

Some companies can combine both areas to determine who the ideal customer is. Is it male or female? How old are they? What are their other interests? How much do they buy each purchase? Why do they love the brand? Much of this info can be found in customer data.

Knowing this info makes it easier to focus messaging on these specific areas rather than a mass push. Call eXpect3 for all of your marketing and branding needs.