How do you advertise? or is that Market your business?

So what is advertising and what is marketing? In Wikipedia we discover:
“Advertising is a form of communication whose purpose is to inform potential customers about products and services and how to obtain and use them. Many advertisements are also designed to generate increased consumption of those products and services through the creation and reinforcement of brand image and brand loyalty. For these purposes advertisements often contain both factual information and persuasive messages.”
“Marketing is an ongoing process of planning and executing of the marketing mix (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) of products, services or ideas to create exchange between individuals and organizations. Marketing tends to be seen as a creative industry, which includes advertising, distribution and selling. It is also concerned with anticipating the customers' future needs and wants, which are often discovered through market research.”
They sound a lot alike and when people use them concerning trying to promote their product or web page they often seem to use them interchangeably. They are not. Advertising is an aspect of marketing but it is only a part of what marketing is all about but you can’t market a product without advertising it in some way. Advertising says “buy” and “buy now and here is the reason why” where marketing starts off by saying I am here and I have a product I think you might be interested in but I want you to trust me and I will do whatever I need to do to try and prove that to you. This trust factor is very important when working on the internet as there is no face for people to see, no voice to hear, no body language to pick up on and therefore people find it hard to know who to trust or believe. Added to that is the fact that most of us have been burned by someone making big promises and not delivering.

This is even more of an issue today with identity theft increasing and the average person more concerned about privacy issues. Organizations that consistently take the high road on privacy, spam, and other like issues will endear themselves to customers and build trust.

As a result people (marketers) try using a picture of themselves or a voice recording, but even more popular today is video. Through video people can see the face and hear the voice which gives people an opportunity to get a “trust read” which is one of the reasons video is so effective in any marketing strategy today. It doesn’t change the fact though that there are people out there (and not just a few) who seem believable who are ready and willing to steal from us.

For those of us who are honestly trying to do business on the internet (and fortunately I believe we are the majority) it is all the more important to take the high road in marketing.

Next time we will start talking about some marketing methods in more detail, but I thought I needed to lay some ground work for that discussion.

“building trust will build your business”