Many people use digital marketing and social media marketing interchangeably. They believe that engaging in different social media platforms is digital marketing, but this is just a part of it.
Digital marketing is an umbrella term that encompasses all types of marketing activities that a brand performs digitally, both online and offline, to promote their services or products. Social media marketing, on the other hand, is one of the channels of digital media marketing. It involves marketing on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
What is Digital Media Marketing?
According to the dictionary, marketing is the action of promoting business’ products or services to make them more noticeable to the people and drive sales. The addition of the word ‘digital’ to marketing means utilizing digital media channels to promote your products or services.
Digital marketing is about the implementation of a variety of customized digital media marketing channels to achieve any of the following objectives:
– To grow your products or services sales and profits
– Create your brand awareness and build a strong relationship with your target audience
– Create and add value
– Promote your products or services or brand
– And many more!
Remember that it is not necessary to include all available digital media marketing channels in your marketing campaign to accomplish your goals. Digital marketers develop a customized digital marketing strategy that includes the most appropriate digital marketing channels that fit your business, target audience, and of course, your budget.
Using all the digital marketing channels is not a wise decision and do not have the right impact. The choice of digital media channels depends on your industry, business, and type of audience. Due to this, you often need to test, make changes, retest and measure the outcomes of your digital marketing campaigns to determine which works best for your brand or business. Based on these results, you can drop those digital marketing channels, which fail to provide satisfactory growth or ROI.
What exactly is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is only one aspect of digital marketing. It implies the use of social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Goggle+, Snapchat, etc. to marketing your products, services, or brand. Typically, it involves engagement with your target audience, followers, seeking industry influencers, posting fresh and unique content, arranging contests and adopting a variety of other means to grab the attention of the audience present on different social media channels.
What is Digital Marketing Tools?
Modern digital marketers have to be active on several forums at the same time to stay on the same level as their competitors. Whether you require digging through information or data or fine-tune your marketing strategy, numerous digital marketing tools help you to save your time and keep your sanity. Some of the digital marketing tools according to the strategy include:
– Email marketing
– Paid social media marketing
– Video hosting tools
– Social media channels
– Website analytics
– Content creation tools
– SEO tools
– Customer service tools
– Affiliate marketing
– Display retargeting
– Organic social media marketing
– Content curation
Why Should You Include Social Media Marketing in Your Digital Marketing Campaign?
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. top digital marketing agencies 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.
Digital Marketing versus Social Media Marketing
After reading the above explanations, it must be clear to you that social media marketing is just a part of digital marketing. The comparison of both side by side gives you the following:
– 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.
– The success of your social media marketing campaign depends heavily on your content strategy. It means you need to keep posting fresh and unique content on your social media accounts to interact and engage your target audience. While for digital marketing, you can only use the banner advertisements on different digital platforms like TV, the Internet, or billboards to promote your product, services or brand.
This post was previously published on SocialSellinator’s blog
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jock Breitwieser.
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Author: Jock Breitwieser
With 20+ years of international communications expertise in agencies and in-house, Jock Breitwieser is an award-winning communicator. He focuses on Digital Marketing and Communications.
Throughout his career, Jock worked in agencies and in-house, running global marketing programs that deliver business results. He is currently based in Silicon Valley, California.