Promotion Is Not Marketing – Here’s The Difference

Marketing is NOT the same as promotion.

Let’s clear this once and for all, if you focus all your efforts on promoting your music or other art without doing proper marketing, you’re wasting most of your energy, time and money.

Honestly, I’m getting tired of people who call themselves marketers, but only offer promotion services like getting views, clicks and followers. How effective is paying someone to get you a bunch of clicks or views that don’t lead anywhere, because it doesn’t match your target group or it’s demands? As stated in another article, you could throw your money out the window, that would make more people happy than just the so-called marketer. It’s not just the numbers that count, remember.

Promotion is an essential part of marketing, but not a stand-alone action.

For a lot of, if not most people promotion is the last part of a well-planned marketing campaign. That’s because all the other steps provide an excellent decision-making basis for how to approach the public and gatekeepers.

The good and bad is, everybody can get into it and do it, it’s a broadly and easily accessible field/job. But remember, the easier it is to get into a profession, the higher the risk for scams or someone selling you something else than you actually want/need.

If you want to figure out if somebody is a real marketer, see if he/she stresses the difference between marketing and promotion. But what is it??

Many people have said it before and will say it in the future, here’s my informed definition;

PROMOTION focuses on the product and selling it, MARKETING focuses on the customer’s needs and demands and how to meet those, regarding the organization’s goals and objectives.

Some steps of the overall marketing-mix, which promotion is a part of, naturally intertwine with each other.

Quotes:

1. Promotion

Promotion refers to the activities to push forward or to advance an idea, in such a way as to gain its approval and acceptance. Promotion is telling and selling.

[Essentials of Marketing by Manmohan Joshi, 2012]

2. Marketing

Marketing is essentially a matching process between the needs and expectations of customers and the organization’s ability and capacity to satisfy them. For this matching process to take place successfully, the organization must understand who the customer is and what value is required and how best to deliver this value on a sustainable basis in line with the organization’s overall corporate objectives. [Marketing; a complete guide by Malcolm McDonald and Martin Christopher, 2003]

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