Marketing vs Branding

When starting your own business you have probably asked yourself the question, what is the difference between your companies branding and marketing? You like many are bound to get them mixed up, which is easy as both are massive connected and they both effect each other, yet there are a few differences. When starting your own business or company it is essential that know every detail about both branding and marketing, resulting in you being able to utilise them together, making advertising more beneficial for your business.

Marketing

Your businesses marketing is the tool you use to deliver the message of your brand, therefore it is on going as your services and products change or offers and deal change your marketing will evolve around said changes yet still keeping your brand in place. Your company marketing will always be targeting towards the sector of your audience when ever your services or prices change, but always be revolving around the value of your brand. You can choose to approach your businesses marketing in many different ways in a wide range of many different methods, such as:

Social Media Marketing
Search Engine Optimisation
PPC Marketing
Content Creation
Printed Ads
Television
Radio

As you can see there are many different forms of marketing for your business both on and offline, yet these marketing methods will come and go over time, no doubt there will be many different new forms of marketing to come in the future but as mention, your business brand will still remain throughout.

Branding

As we’ve established, marketing is building the awareness of your business. Branding is who you are and what your business or company stands for. While marketing manages how tactically your going to go about putting yourself out there, branding determines who your brand is and that will always remain the same. When creating your businesses brand you need to strip back the generalisation of the industry or business sector and all your products, sales and offers and really determine who you are as a business, ask yourself these questions.

What makes your business unique?
What are your business values?
What made you start the business?
How do you want to change your industry?
What are your businesses goals?
What id your communication characteristic?
What do you want people to see when looking at your brand?

These should be the first questions you ask yourself before making any marketing decisions, as these will strongly determine how you go about marketing your brand at a later date. Once you’ve answered all the above questions you have effectively created the look and feel of your brand on the inside, therefore what you build on the inside will reflect externally when creating marketing campaigns.

In conclusion determining your brand are the first steps you need to take when starting a businesses, these steps are essential as they shouldn’t change throughout, they will cultivate what your customers expect from you and will massively influence how you go about marketing towards them. However your marketing methods will change throughout time, finding different ways to advertise your products and services and adapting to modern forms of marketing campaigns.

If you have found this post helpful and wish to enquire about online marketing or establishing your new business brand get in touch with Faber Web Design.