Digital Marketing VS Digital Advertising: Explained

You use the Internet for almost everything today. While on the internet, you may have come across various types of advertisements. Companies are using marketing and promotions through online platforms. For any business, this is an essential aspect of its growth strategy now. If you see an ad on the internet about any product or service, what is it exactly? Is it marketing or advertising? Maybe, you are a business owner. What would you choose for your business? Would you choose digital marketing or digital advertising? In this article, I will try to explain digital marketing vs digital advertising. Are these terms the same or different? In either of the two scenarios, up to what extent? Let us explore and understand this in detail.

What Is Digital Marketing ?

Digital marketing is a combination of a wide variety of functions that a business performs. It includes customer research, market research, promoting the service or the product, and sales. The term digital refers that all the mentioned activities being done using digital technologies. So, you are achieving your marketing objectives through technologies and the internet and not by undergoing a traditional approach.

Let me make it more simple and more lucid. Marketing that is done online is digital marketing. Marketing would refer to exploring your product or service and trying to send a message to your target audience on the same. Here are some components that come under the umbrella of digital marketing.

SEO

It is Search Engine Optimization. It refers to building an online presence of your website and generating organic traffic toward it through search engines.

SMM

It is Social Media Marketing. It includes the promotion of your product and services through the use of social media platforms.

Content marketing

It refers to the creation and publishing of content for a targetted audience that would improve your business reach.

Email marketing

It refers to the marketing of your product and service using cold emails to your targetted audience.

Online advertising

This is advertising using digital tools and the internet. You can call it digital advertising too. (We will cover this in detail further)

What Is Digital Advertising?

Digital Advertising is a subset of digital marketing. It is also referred to as online advertising or internet advertising. When you promote your service or product using the internet, it is digital advertising. In more simple words, if you see any ad on the internet, it is digital advertising. So, it is simply an ad on the internet. Digital advertising comes under the umbrella of digital marketing. It is one of the core functions of digital marketing.

You can have different types of digital advertising types. If you see a promoted search result on your search engine result, it is a pay-per-click ad. The other can be a banner ad or a video ad you see on various blog websites. The last would be social media ads. You see such ads on social media platforms.

Here is one example of each type of digital advertising

Pay-Per-Click Ad

Please observe the term “Ad” mentioned at the top left of “semrush.com”.

Banner Ad

Social Media Ads

Here is one example of an ad on Instagram. Observe the term “sponsored” written on the post.

Digital Marketing Vs Digital Advertising

In the most simple and clear words, digital advertising is a subset of digital marketing. Digital marketing includes a lot of functions of which digital advertising is one of them.

Here is a table that will highlight points and help us understand the difference better.

Bottom Line

In a nutshell, digital advertising is a subset of digital marketing. Many professionals in the domain of advertising and marketing may use the terms interchangeably. However, they are well-versed in their definitions. It is just a way of speaking and conveying the objective. Moreover, companies dwelling in these fields have separate departments and budgets for both of them. Advertising would work under the marketing team or alongside the marketing team in most cases. As a business owner, one must focus on the wide spectrum of digital marketing. Digital advertising as a subset would eventually be covered under it.

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