I’m learning all of this as I go to support my business so I’m less concerned about formal definitions, and more concerned about practical application that achieves results.

But I still need to distinguish between terms like Sales, Marketing, Branding… so here we go.

Marketing is attention. (I suspect I took this from Gary V)

Advertising is paying for attention.

When we have someone’s attention, we want to keep it. So we create content. (Content Marketing).

We want them to ‘want’ our content. Which means we want to turn them into fans or followers. We do this with a combination of:

• content and
• calls to action to consume our content

Paradoxically the calls to action are also content - either embedded (subscribe, follow, etc.) or a specific Call To Action post.

At points we will want to convert our fans, or people who have given us their attention, into customers. This is a call to action that takes people through a sales process.

We then enter a support and thank you relationship - exclusive forums, special offers etc.

Branding is what we want people to think of, when they think of us, and what they actually think of us. The two might not match.