Digital marketing and social media marketing are both extremely important for businesses to market their presence online. However, it is important to understand that social media marketing is only a subset of digital marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
In layman terms, digital marketing means using digital platforms to market your product or services. The choice of digital media would depend on the type of business, industry, or the target audience. Digital marketing can be done through both online and offline marketing channels.
- Online marketing channels: SEO Services, website marketing, mobile marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, video marketing.
- Offline marketing channels: Radio, television, digital billboards, SMS
Thus, social media marketing is only one kind of method used in digital marketing. Let us now look at it in more detail.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing essentially means using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, etc. to market your product and services. Social media marketing can either be done yourself, or you can hire a Social Media Marketing Agency for the same. The idea is to engage with your target audience, create followers, post regular content, and grab attention.
Though social media marketing is most widely used by companies and businesses for maximum publicity, it is often not enough. This is because of the following reasons:
- If you do not have sufficient funds to hire a social media marketing agency, then social media marketing can turn out to be an extremely time-taking proposition.
- You do not own the content you post, and sometimes there are a number of rules and restrictions to be followed.
- You have to go looking out for users, instead of the users coming to you by using techniques such as SEO and content marketing.
- There are still a lot of people who do not have a social networking account.
A number of other Digital Marketing methods such as SEO services and website marketing are equally important for a business. With the help of SEO services, you can optimize your website for achieving higher rankings in search engines for certain keywords. Earlier, SEO was just about using a number of keywords and stuffing them into articles. However, now SEO has become more complex, and you must hire an agency specializing in SEO services to get it right.
Which is better?
Social media marketing is just one part of digital marketing, and through social media is capable of giving your business maximum publicity, digital marketing has been used for a very long time and is not going anywhere. Every business needs to understand its target audience and expectations from the marketing strategy, and accordingly decide if they wish to focus only on social media marketing, or also venture into other modes of digital marketing such as SEO and content marketing.
Going digital is definitely the future of marketing, and thus, social media marketing and other forms of digital marketing have to be used in accord with each other.
