Many new business owners get a little mixed up with the terminology involved with selling their products and services. To ensure that as many people as possible know about your products and services, you’ll need to use marketing and promotion to accomplish it.
So what’s the difference between marketing and promotion?
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The Difference Between Marketing and Promotion
What Is Marketing?
According to the online business dictionary (businessdictionary.com), “…marketing is an attempt to appeal to an entire market with a marketing strategy that includes product, price, place, and promoting.”
What Is Promotion?
Promotion consists of using business communication to inform, persuade, or remind your audience about your products or services. To promote, you’ll want to explain the benefits of the features, show where to get them, answer questions, and more. To promote, you’ll use advertising, publicity, personal selling, and sales promotion to succeed.
Promotion Is Part of Marketing
As you notice, promotion is one of “the four P’s” of marketing and is one of the most important aspects of marketing. This is often called the “marketing mix.” Advertising is part of promoting, as is anything else you do to ensure that your audience knows about your products and services.
When to Use Them
Because promotion is part of the overall marketing mix, you’ll need to figure out which activities are involved in your promotional strategy. You may choose to use all of these or just one of these ideas. They include personal selling, advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing, and publicity.
Here are some examples:
- Advertising – Using social media platforms such as Facebook Ads
- Public Relations or Publicity – Sending out press releases, tying your sales to a charity or other goodwill
- Sales Promotion – Working with affiliates and doing demos on live webinars
- Direct Marketing – Advertising directly to target customers with email, coupons, phone calls, catalogs, etc
- Personal Selling – Working with the buyer one-on-one to make the sale
They Go Hand in Hand
Promotion, in other words, is an essential part of the overall marketing mix, and it focuses on attracting the attention of your ideal audience and persuading them to act. If you skip this part of your marketing efforts, it’s going to be difficult to capture customers for your amazing product in a timely manner. Promotion, after product, is thought to be the most important aspect of marketing.
The point at which you start using promotion is after you’ve created the product, know who wants to buy it, and where and how you’ll deliver it. Promoting can be through paid advertising, contests, content marketing, rebates, incentives, and rewards, and more.
Whatever you do, your promotional mix is part of your overall marketing strategy and should begin when the product is ready for the public.
How To Promote Your Business & Avoid Common Mistakes
Marketing your business is something that you can’t ignore. Don’t mistake the idea that you can run a business easily today without having to market it. Budget or not, you must engage in marketing so that people learn about your business and offerings. If you don’t, no one will ever find you.
But we all make mistakes. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t. Every business owner at some or another has or will make minor boo-boos and some cataclysmic mistakes. It’s all part of the learning process. Although mistakes are going to happen, you can avoid the common business mistakes and other pitfalls that are lurking around the corner. Download my free checklist, Common Business & Marketing Mistakes and avoid the false moves and slipups that even veteran entrepreneurs and business owners make.
