Does your company spend money on ads every month and yet still struggle to explain exactly what those euros are translating into?
Investment in digital advertising in Spain reached 6.211 billion euros in 2025, up 11.2% from the previous year, according to the latest report from IAB Spain and PwC. This figure does not distinguish between companies with a strategy and those without one, but it does make one thing clear: there is a lot of money at stake, and a large portion of the decisions driving it are made under the label of “marketing” without actually being so. When a company says “we are going to do marketing” and what it actually does is activate an ad campaign on social media or Google, it spends the budget, looks at the impressions, and crosses its fingers.
And therein lies the problem: advertising is only one piece of marketing, not the whole of marketing. When a company confuses the two, it ends up investing in visibility without a clear direction and, when results do not arrive, concludes that “advertising does not work” instead of asking whether there was ever a strategy behind it.
What is marketing and what is advertising?
According to the American Marketing Association, marketing is “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, partners, and society at large.” In other words: it is everything that must be decided so that a product reaches the right person, at the right price, through the right channel, and so that the person wants to buy from you again. It includes market research, defining your target audience, setting the price, choosing distribution, and, yes, also promotion. Hence the famous “4 Ps” of marketing: product, price, place (distribution), and promotion.
Advertising lives within that last P. It is much more specific: buying a space (a billboard, a Google ad, a sponsored video) to deliver a message to an audience and generate recognition or immediate action. It speaks in only one direction, from the company to the public, has a direct cost per space or impression, and is measured with metrics such as reach, clicks, or cost per acquisition.
And where is the difference really noticed? In the fact that marketing decides who, what, and why; advertising solves how to communicate it. An ad can have a great design, impeccable platform segmentation, and persuasive copy, and still be useless, because no one decided beforehand who it should reach or what was going to be offered to them.
Why do companies confuse them so often?
Advertising is what is seen. It has a start date, a design, a dashboard with numbers. Market research or the definition of the ideal customer, on the other hand, are processes that cannot be shown in a screenshot.
Furthermore, activating a campaign is fast and gives a sense of immediate control: it is turned on, the spend is visible, and the result is seen in real time. Defining a strategy, however, requires time and, often, making uncomfortable decisions (changing the price, rethinking the target audience, adjusting the product) that do not appear on any metrics panel.
And if the only provider a company works with is the one managing their ads, it is not surprising that they end up thinking that this is “marketing” in its entirety. They do not know any other part of the mechanism because they have never worked with it.
Finally, there is the most tempting shortcut of all: when sales drop, the almost automatic reaction is “let’s do more advertising,” instead of asking whether the problem lies in the product, the price, or the value proposition. Advertising becomes a patch for a problem that is, at its core, strategic.
The 7 errors that are repeated time and again
Take note, because you will surely recognize some of these patterns in your own company (or in a client’s, if you work at an agency).
1 – Launching campaigns without knowing who they are talking to
A B2B SME decides to “do marketing” and activates LinkedIn ads aimed, generically, at “directors and managers.” No one has sat down beforehand to define what specific role, in what type of company, and with what specific pain point.
And the difference is not cosmetic: according to the Dreamdata B2B LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks report (2025), campaigns with precise targeting (by sector, job title, and company size) achieve an average CTR of 0.56%, compared to 0.39% for campaigns with broad targeting. That is 44% more clicks for the same investment, just for having stopped beforehand to define who you are talking to. The usual conclusion (“LinkedIn doesn’t work for us”) often hides this prior problem: a lack of strategic segmentation before buying the advertising space.
2 – Confusing activity with results
Another classic: chaining campaigns month after month, one ad after another, without any action responding to a specific business objective. And it is fertile ground: in the HubSpot State of Marketing 2024 report, 39.99% of surveyed marketing professionals point to the difficulty of setting measurable goals as one of their main daily challenges. If it is already hard to set the objective, it is even easier for activity (publishing, launching, repeating) to replace the objective itself. When months pass without results, the conclusion is usually “marketing doesn’t work,” instead of “we never decided what we needed to achieve.”
3 – Increasing the ad budget to cover a fundamental problem
When sales drop, the most common response is to increase advertising investment. But if the price is not competitive, if the product does not solve the customer’s need well, or if the value proposition is not communicated clearly, more ads fix nothing. They only accelerate the rate at which money is lost.
4 – Copying the competition without context
A competitor publishes videos on social media and seems to be doing well, so the same format is replicated without asking if that company has the same margin, the same digital maturity, or the same sales cycle. The result is usually a campaign that looks like the rival’s but is not built on its own strategy, and therefore does not connect in the same way with the actual audience of the one copying.
5 – Measuring success only by reach or impressions
A campaign with thousands of impressions and many “likes” is celebrated as an achievement, even if it has not generated a single lead or sale. The fact is that reach is an advertising metric, not a business indicator. A campaign can be working wonderfully as advertising (reaching many people) while being, at the same time, a total failure as marketing, because no one has bought anything.
6 – Splitting advertising and the rest of marketing among providers who do not talk to each other
It is common for an SME to work with a community manager on one side, an ad agency on another, and a web designer on yet another, each optimizing their own area without a cohesive vision. They end up paying more to achieve less, because the money is spent on solving individual pieces and no one ensures that everything fits together.
7 – Hiring for “marketing” and actually asking for isolated tasks
A company hires a freelancer or brings someone onto the staff “for marketing,” and what they ask for on a daily basis is to design some posts in Canva or Photoshop, post on Instagram three times a week, and answer messages. No one has sat down beforehand to define an objective, an audience, or what is expected to be achieved with that presence.
Several agencies that advise SMEs point to this as the most repeated underlying error. As one of those analyses summarizes, “being on social media is not doing digital marketing […] many companies publish without visual coherence, without segmentation, and without measuring results,” and the problem is almost never the budget, but the direction: no one decided beforehand what had to be achieved.
When months pass without results, the conclusion is that social media does not work for the company, when what actually happened was that execution was hired without anyone first deciding on the marketing strategy.
How to avoid this error in your company
Marketing decides the what and the why: who you are targeting, what you are offering them, at what price, why they should choose you and not your competition. Advertising executes the how, before whom, and when: it turns those decisions into a specific message, purchased in a specific space, for a specific moment.
And advertising is always evaluated within that framework, never separately. It is not enough for the ad to have good reach: it must serve an objective that was already defined before launching it.
So, before activating your next campaign, I propose a simple question: what marketing decision supports this ad? If you do not have a clear answer, what you are lacking is not more advertising. It is more strategy.
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