In this article, we are going to talk about what is the actual difference between Digital Marketing vs Social Media Marketing. But before we get started with Digital Marketing vs Social Media Marketing, we have to first talk about what is actually marketing. After we get the perfect definition of marketing, we will move ahead towards Digital Marketing vs Social Media Marketing.
Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses. Some marketing is done by affiliates on behalf of a company. Let’s understand it in a simple way.
Alright, let's talk in a simple way, something I love to do. As I fell in love with marketing years ago when I first got interested in figuring out why people buy and act the way they do and later how influence and persuasion essentially affect human behavior. Because, whether you have a business or not Marketing happens pretty much every day. Any time you try to convince friends or family to see a certain movie or eat at this restaurant or not that or basically try to convince them to do anything, Marketing is happening.
Also, marketing is really important to understand, because you are constantly being marketed to by everyone from everywhere. From something as simple as someone trying to sell you a pair of shoes to something a lot bigger, like buying a new house or moving across the country or even changing careers. All of this requires and uses marketing.
I hope so you understand the term marketing, now let’s look at Digital Marketing vs Social Media Marketing one by one. So, first of all, Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is the form of marketing through which you can advertise people digitally digital marketing done by different channels like search engines, social media platforms, websites, television, emails and mobile applications. Digital marketing gives marketers the opportunity to interact with and understand the audience better. It also helps to increase the trust between audiences. Digital marketing also shows marketer's advertisements to people based on their actions on the internet. So that’s making it less expensive as compared to traditional ways of advertisement. There are also so many types of digital marketing:
1. Social Media Marketing
2. Influencer Marketing
3. Email Marketing
4. Content Marketing
5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Marketing
6. Pay-per-click (PPC)
7. Affiliate Marketing
Now we are done with a good introduction to digital marketing. Now let’s talk about social media marketing. Basically, as we saw in digital marketing, social media marketing is the subpart of digital marketing. Now let’s talk about social media marketing briefly.
Social media marketing would give us the opportunity to take advantage of social media platforms to advertise your content to a highly targeted audience. It would help more people learn about your product increase the interaction with the audience and it's relatively inexpensive unless you go into advertising and will help you get marketplace insights that might help in understanding your audience preferences better.
In social media marketing, you can also learn about the different types of content he could post on social media some of the most common forms of content that you could post would be images text posts polls and videos.
To advertise your content that you would need to use the advertising options provided by the social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Linked In and Twitter. Most advertising platforms offer users a number of different options like image ads, these ads involve the use of single or multiple images that are attractive and have the optimal amount of text. They also have a call to action that encourages user interaction.
So now let’s back on track what are the main differences between Digital Marketing vs Social Media Marketing. Here I pick 3 major points to differentiate between Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing.
1] Channels:
In Digital Marketing we have lots of options in channels. Channels mean platforms where we can do marketing. So, in Digital marketing we have websites, email, social media, Organic Search (SEO), Paid Search (SEM), Mobile, Display Ads, etc.
In Social Media Marketing we have Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, Tik-Tok, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, QQ and Ozone, Reddit, Quora, etc. So, you're thinking that there are more options in social media marketing as compared to digital marketing. But as I told you earlier Social media marketing is a subtype of Digital marketing so digital marketing already covered all of them.
2] Reach:
So basically, Digital marketing uses both online and offline digital means to reach out to the target audience, while social media marketing is limited to online boundaries. Your digital media marketing campaign may use a variety of channels such as mobile advertisements, TV, online advertising, SMS, etc. while social media marketing may focus on one or more than one social media channel such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. So, the reach of digital marketing is more than social media marketing.
3] Content which we can upload:
In the case of digital marketing we can upload Blogging, Video, Podcasting, Infographics, Email, Visual content, eBook’s, Lead magnets, Whitepapers, Slide Share presentations, Quizzes/tools, Checklists, Courses, Webinars, Slide decks, Free apps, Social media posts. So yes, we got lots of variety to upload here.
In the case of social media marketing, we have User Generated Content, Podcasts, Live Streams, Infographics, VR Content, Webinars, Client Testimonials, eBook’s, Guides. And here again, Digital marketing have more content to post
So, guy’s that’s it. Here are the differences we have and that’s how we can differentiate between Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing.
So here I want to give my perspective to you, Today’s world has become increasingly social. Research shows that internet users spend nearly 30% of their online time on social media platforms. If you want to place your business in front of people and expand your reach globally, social media marketing is a must for your business.
Most of the businesses and brands experience a quicker response rate from social media marketing campaigns as compared to other forms of digital media marketing. But this is not enough to achieve the set marketing goals. To harness the optimal benefits and achieve maximum ROI, it is necessary for businesses and brands to include other digital marketing components in their digital marketing campaign and not only focus on social media marketing.
And always remember one thing "Our jobs as marketers are to understand how the customer wants to buy and help them do so."