It is important for every company to have its Business strategy to get profit and for growth. Both Marketing and Communication are a part of the business plan.
Marketing focuses on selling and promoting any product of your company to the targeted audience. On the other hand, Communication is conveying certain specific messages to the audience, which is not necessarily related to selling any product or service.
Marketing vs Communications
The main difference between Marketing and Communication is Marketing focuses on customer behaviors, whereas Communication focuses on customer satisfaction and customer attitude. Marketing is promoting and selling the products and services, whereas Communication is the way of storytelling and conveying the message to the targeted audience. It may or may not be about any product or service.
The act of promoting and selling any product or service using thoughtful strategy and market researching is known as Marketing. It is a part of the overall business plan and is required from the beginning of any product development. It mainly focuses on customer behavior and analyzing the performance. Marketers use communications as tools to reach audiences.
Communication is a simple to exchange of messages and basically is storytelling which is not necessarily about a product or a service. It focuses more on customer attitudes and words. Communicators usually write compelling copies in different voices depending on the targeted audiences. Communicators tend to change the customer’s attitude by influencing their opinion and perception.
Comparison Table Between Marketing and Communications
| Parameters of Comparison | Marketing | Communications |
| Focused Areas | It focuses on advertising and educating the target audience for selling the product or service. | It focuses on exchanging important messages and basically plays a role as a storyteller. |
| Benefits | It helps in driving business, reaching out to new customers, retaining old customers. | It helps in building the brand and supporting the sales team. |
| Challenges | It mostly faces challenges like understanding customer behavior, creating growth, lack of marketing knowledge, etc. | It has challenges like language barriers, lack of varieties of communication tools, less control of the message, etc. |
| Purpose | Its purpose is to understand customer behaviors and increase the numbers to measure the overall clicks or no. of purchases. | Its purpose is to play with words, writing compelling copies, and understand customer attitudes. |
| Timing | It is used from the beginning of product development. | It is used as there is progress in development. |
What is Marketing?
A common term used these days for selling or advertising a product or service is called Marketing. It is targeting the product or service to its most likely customers as well as reach out to new also. The strategy used by Marketers is known as the 4 Ps of marketing that are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Marketing includes making plans, describing the details of the products, justifying its pricing, talk out its features, and how it is going to benefits the audiences. Its motive is to make more and more sales and generate revenues.
Marketing focuses on numbers than words. In other words, it can be said that Marketing is analyzing the campaign performances, making reports of the efforts used, and studying the economic trends going on in the Industry. It is more focused on “who” on social media platforms. It can include everything starting from the development of the product to deciding the platforms for sales and selecting a point of sales locations.
What is Communications?
Communication is part of the Marketing strategy and is needed as progress happens on the development of any project. It is basically conveying and sharing messages to customers and stakeholders, and the relevant messages may or may not be regarding any selling of products and services. The medium used are ads, newsletters, social media, websites, and many more.
It focuses on words, and Communicators are great at making compelling copies using different voices depending on the targeted audience and retain the customers through their copies. It also focuses on customer attitudes and measures customer satisfaction and credibility.
They deliver the message and focus on “how” on social media. A good communicator will be helpful in building a brand and supporting the sales team. It is basically influencing and using people’s perceptions. It helps in building a special relationship with customers by reaching out to them.
Main Differences Between Marketing and Communications
- The main difference between Marketing and Communication is Marketing will make a strategy for recognizing “who” on social media, whereas Communications is focusing more on “how.”
- Marketing deals with customer behaviors and focuses on numbers, whereas Communications deals with customer attitudes and focuses more on words.
- The goal of marketing is mainly to advertise and educate the target audience for selling any product or service, whereas the main goal of communication is to convey a message to the audience which may not necessarily be about a product or service.
- Marketing includes promoting any product or service, or company by using social media and reaching out to more and more customers, whereas communication is how the marketing strategy will execute, which will help in brand promotion by writing compelling copies.
- Marketing is very important for the day of the start of product development, whereas Communication becomes important when things start progressing.
Conclusion
Marketing and Communication both go hand in hand, and both are important as a part of marketing strategy. Their focus is on brand awareness and optimizing performance.
They both focus on the target audience with a difference that Marketing deals with the promotion of a certain product, service, or company, and Communication deals with conveying and exchanging information that is not confined to any product or service.
Marketers tend to analyze the campaign performance to know the customer behavior, and Communicators focuses more on customers’ credibility and satisfaction.
At the end of the day, both have the similar goal to reach out to maximum customers and build a brand image.
References
- https://academic.oup.com/heapro/article-abstract/6/2/135/670742
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002224299806200201