As a general rule, as you continue to grow your company, your marketing budget will or should continue to increase as a percentage of revenue.
But there’s a difference between marketing and advertising.
What is marketing?
Here’s how our clients distinguish the two:
We define “marketing” as every touch point you have with a customer. These include:
- The cleanliness of your parking lot and your restrooms
- How quickly and how friendly your phone gets answered
- How well you keep your promises
- How well you speak to my felt need as a customer
One component of marketing is advertising.
It used to be the most important component, but is it still?
Hmm … I don’t know how to answer that question today. Do you?
What is advertising?
We define “advertising” as any message you pay money to place and run. Those messages you see in the sidebar of your Facebook wall? Someone paid to put those there. Those are advertising.
The way your friend raved on Facebook about the awesome experience she had with a company? That delightful, shareworthy experience is marketing.
And in spite of the fact that mass media is losing some of its mass, marketing—including its subset called “advertising”—continues to work.
In fact, with so many voices screaming for attention like an overcrowded preschool classroom, telling a great story – great marketing – has never been more important. The web tends to make good marketing for a good business work more quickly.
For unremarkable companies, advertising – PPC, Groupon, throwing stuff onto a T.V. or a radio, putting stuff in mailboxes (whether email or old-fashioned) – is working less and less well by the second.
But a great company? Thanks to the lightning speed of interconnectivity, marketing and advertising accelerate the growth of a great company logarithmically.
Boom! It takes off because they’re making more people aware, and reminding people who’ve done business with the company, how awesome it was.
Have you ever been to Disney? They understand every employee – or cast member – is in the marketing department.
The same is true of your company – whether you want to believe it or not.
