Digital Marketing vs Digital Advertising: What’s The Difference?

Digital Marketing vs Digital Advertising: An Overview

Digital marketing is the means by which people and companies alike get their message out to their target audience.  Various marketing channels can be used to provide info and also sell a product to an audience.

The two main ways to go about digital marketing online are either through organic free methods or through paid methods.

I personally like most people prefer the free methods of digital marketing to draw attention to what you have to offer. 

In fact, 84% of people expect brands to create content.

This means that you create valuable content for a specific audience that is…

1. Informative
2. Interesting
3. Has A Call-To-Action (CTA)

By using these including these three things in every piece of content you create, you’ll start to get traffic and make sales for you either your own digital product or an affiliate product that you’re promoting.

Now, let’s switch gears to have a quick overview of digital advertising.

Under the umbrella of digital marketing, you have digital advertising which is purely about using ads to drive and convert traffic to make sales.

Small businesses that use Google Ads spend between $9,000 and $10,000 per month on PPC.

The cool part is that you can use many of the same platforms and marketing channels for both organic and paid advertising.

The big thing to keep in mind with digital advertising and paid ads is that you’ll need to have the revenue coming in to be able to spend initially learning a new advertising platform.

Don’t expect to throw up an advertisement and suddenly start being profitable after spending $100 or so.  You’ll want to make sure that you have extra income of around $10,000 so that you can use it to start to learn an advertising platform.  Then you have a good chance at making profitable ads that will be bringing you in money. 

The other thing to keep in mind is that your target audience is only so big with paid advertising.  This means that eventually you’ll exhaust the audience for a specific ad and target audience and you’ll need to create a new ad.  Otherwise, your ad will become unprofitable and you’ll simply be wasting money.  

The big takeaway here is that you’ll still need to always be testing with digital advertising and creating new ads to continue to stay profitable long-term.

Digital Marketing vs Digital Advertising: What Marketing Channels Are Used For Each? (Examples Included)

Here are the different marketing channels used for both digital marketing and digital advertising.

1. Search Engines

The two biggest search engines currently are Google and YouTube.

Search engines allow you as a content creator and advertiser to connect with an audience that’s specifically searching a question.  This means you can target directly people who are at certain stages of the buying process directly.

There are lots of ways to break down the customer journey but here are the three main steps:

1. Awareness – Someone in this stage is typically asking a general question and is not quite sure what they’re looking for.  This is a time where you can create something that points someone to a specific area of interest.
2. Research – The research phase occurs when someone already knows what they’re looking for to solve their problem and may need to do further research.
3. Purchase – The purchase phase is where you have buyer-intent keywords and the person searching is ready to make a purchase.  This also means that the search queries are much more competitive to rank for organically and the cost per click is much higher when advertising.

2. Social Media

Social media is a way for you to connect and build relationships with your audience.

Using social media for digital marketing is paramount if you’re looking to create more than just transactional content and want to decommoditize what you’re providing.

Using social media for digital marketing is ultimately a great way to grow brand recognition and have people coming back to want to hear from you ahead of your competitors.

For digital advertising, it’s important to recognize that the ads you create for social media will need to be a pattern interrupt.  This ensures that you get a higher CTR and spending less on advertising costs. 

3. Websites & Blogs (Native Advertising & Display Ads)

Start a blog is something that every brand needs to do if you ask me.  

Your company website is where people know to go to catch up on the latest things that you have to offer.

Perhaps the best part about your own website is that you aren’t controlled by another company as you are with social media where you can get shut down at any moment.

The cool part about digital advertising and blogs is that you can even advertise directly on any website that allows advertisers on it.  In other words, you can find the websites in your niche and target the exact type of people who are searching for what you’re offering.

The two main types of digital advertising on websites are:

1. Native Ads – These ads are made to match the look and feel of the website that they’re placed on.
2. Display Ads – These ads are visually appealing and potentially more clickbait to entice a reader or viewer of a website to click on them.

4. Remarketing

Remarketing doesn’t really occur on a specific digital platform but can really be done on any platform where you’re able to follow-up with a potential customer that’s already familiar with your brand.

In terms of digital marketing and organic marketing, the best way I’ve found for following up is through email marketing.  Using email marketing allows you to not be restricted by a social media algorithm when sending out an email campaign so that you can follow up directly with your audience.

With digital advertising, the most common practice for remarketing is to show ads to visitors who went to your sales page but didn’t buy anything. 

The nice part about remarketing and digital advertising is that it’s really easy to install a Facebook pixel or Google remarketing tag on your site or sale funnel and directly target a visitor on any of the different digital advertising platforms.

Main Differences Between Digital Marketing vs Digital Advertising

Now, let’s take a look at some of the differences between digital marketing and digital advertising.

1. Digital Marketing Is Strategy-Driven And Digital Advertising Is Action Focused

Creating a digital marketing strategy for your company is in many ways a lot more involved than setting up a digital advertising campaign.

The main parts of a digital marketing strategy include:

1. Plan – You want to create an effective digital marketing strategy by setting up analytics and recognizing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your business.
2. Reach – Ask yourself: How are you going to be driving traffic?
3. Act – Your audience needs time to warm up and get to know your brand.  This is a great time to encourage engagement on social media so people can follow your brand and gain trust in it.
4. Convert – Conversion is a huge topic but it largely comes down to having a high converting sales page and a good remarketing campaign.  Running split tests to increase your conversion rate will be paramount to implementing an effective digital marketing strategy.
5. Engage – The final step is all about getting repeat customers.  You have a much better chance of doing this when your customers are on your email list and following your social media accounts.

With digital advertising, you have the opportunity to be more action-focused.

You can target a customer directly no matter whether they’re in the awareness stage or buyer stage of the customer journey. 

The main metrics you’ll want to measure for your digital advertising campaign are:

• Click-Through Rate (CTR) – This is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions on an ad.
• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) – This is the cost of advertising spend divided by the number of customers who buy your product.
• Cost Per Lead (CPL) – This is the cost of advertising spend divided by the number of leads generated.

2. Digital Marketing Is Focused On Brand Development And Digital Advertising Provides Awareness

In many ways, digital marketing is all about the long-term health of a brand.

The entire digital marketing strategy ensures that you can take someone who is brand new to your niche and get them to the point of purchasing a product.  This is why it’s more long-term and helps to develop your brand in the eyes of potential customers.

Digital advertising on the other hand confronts someone with your brand and many times the potential customer is unfamiliar with your brand or what it offers.  Digital advertising is ultimately a small part of your bigger digital marketing strategy.

Similarities Between Digital Marketing vs Digital Advertising

Now, let’s dive into a couple of the similarities between digital marketing and digital advertising.

Both Digital Marketing And Digital Advertising Play A Part In The Customer Journey

Digital marketing tackles every part of the customer journey from the point when someone first encounters your brand to getting the first sale and any repeat sales.

Digital advertising also plays a role in the customer journey but is typically either introducing your brand for the first time or converting a potential customer through remarketing.  

So, you can think of digital advertising as part of both your digital marketing strategy and the customer journey with digital marketing.

Both Digital Marketing And Digital Advertising Play Are Revenue Focused

At the end of the day, your company is focused on giving customers what they want to generate revenue.

It just so happens that digital advertising is more focused on the actual conversion of a hot or warmed up lead into a sale.

Digital Marketing vs Digital Advertising: Are both necessary?

Now, you might be wondering: Are both digital marketing and digital advertising necessary to implement for your business to be successful?

Digital marketing can be done through SEO (Search Engine Optimization), creating content for social media, sending out email campaigns, and much more all for free.  So, digital advertising technically is not necessary to get traffic and generate revenue for your business.

However, using digital advertising can greatly accelerate the growth of your business because it allows you to immediately reach your target audience and begin the customer journey for your brand.

With organic marketing, you would have to work hard at building an audience by creating content and then potentially waiting months for it to rank high in the search engines.  

Many companies start off by using purely digital marketing without digital advertising and then investing in advertising later on with the revenue generated.  It’s ultimately a much slower growth curve but both digital marketing and digital advertising lead to a successful business if done right.