Top Difference Between Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is a type of marketing that makes use of electronic devices to deliver promotional messaging and content to a target audience. Digital marketing has different types, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-click marketing, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, email marketing, and mobile marketing.

Digital marketing takes into account the ability of innovative tools or digital platforms to convert leads. That being said, the digital marketing strategy of a company may utilize several platforms or concentrate all of its efforts on a single platform. Nonetheless, whatever type of digital marketing you use can significantly contribute to growing and scaling your business, depending on your marketing strategy and which type suits your business best.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing takes leverage on the massive popularity of social media platforms to exhibit marketing campaign efforts. However, social media marketing goes beyond just simply creating social media accounts and posting content whenever. To make one's marketing efforts successful on social media, a brand must establish an effective social media marketing strategy with quantifiable goals and objectives.

Social media marketing efforts include maintaining and optimizing social media profiles, posting content materials and promotional campaigns, responding to comments, monitoring analytics, following and engaging with followers, building a community, and utilizing paid advertising.

You can do a lot when you utilize social media marketing at its core, considering its huge versatility, reach, and marketing effectiveness, plus the fact that most social media platforms are free. The more effort you put into engaging with your followers on social media, the higher your reach will be, resulting in an increase in brand awareness, and the easier it will be to attain your marketing goals.

What are the Different Digital Marketing Tools?

1. Canva

Canva is a design platform where you can easily drag and drop various artistic elements to create and design your own presentations, content materials, logos, templates, and photos. When you use Canva, you are not required to be a skilled designer to create graphic images or videos because of its extensive creative library which you can extract resources from. You can just simply choose the design template or element that you want and incorporate it into your own. And the best thing about Canva is that it offers a free plan. Nevertheless, they also have a subscription plan if you wish to upgrade the features you enjoy.

2. Slack

Slack transforms modern communication. It allows messages to be sent almost instantaneously and several file formats to be shared. Slack lets you build channels for a chosen group of contacts for group conversation to boost productivity. It also enables you to do video conference sessions. Additionally, Slack works nicely with a variety of other tools and productivity packages and is free for small and medium businesses, while there is custom pricing for bigger businesses.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a powerful CRM software that offers top-notch features such as meeting scheduling, email monitoring, prospect tracking, and even live chats. What also makes HubSpot different from its other counterparts is that it is an easier-to-navigate platform. Ultimately, the software is free. However, only two users are allowed to gain access to the CRM itself. But if your business subscribes to its subscription plan, HubSpot allows access to unlimited users and adds up to a million contacts.

4. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a comprehensive and systematic SEO tool that can assist in increasing website traffic. They have a rigorous library of data on more than 150 million keywords from the United States alone and more than 150 million in other nations. Ahrefs is excellent in terms of competitive analysis because it lets you see who is linking to your direct competitors — their top pages and other information. Ahref's Content Gap tool can be used to detect significant flaws in your content and evaluate how your competitor's content ranks.

5. Google Analytics

The industry standard for website analytics is Google Analytics. Today, it's challenging to work as a digital marketer without some knowledge of Google Analytics. Google Analytics can, at its most basic level, tell you who is visiting your website, where they are coming from, and which pages they are spending the majority of their time on. In addition, you may create an improved e-commerce setup, create targets to track conversions and monitor events to find additional information regarding user engagement.

6. Google Ads

Google's digital advertising platform is called Google Ads. This tool will allow you to create online campaigns that target your target audience precisely at the time when they are interested in the products you provide. Google Ads will help your business create more awareness, boost website traffic, and sell your products or services. Moreover, you can create and modify your ad campaign in terms of budget, spending, ad text, and settings whenever, as Google Ads accounts are operated online. Lastly, Google Ads also gives you the freedom and control over your ad campaign's placement and budget depending on how it fared

What are the Different Social Media Marketing Tools?

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media software used for management that helps you find solutions to your social media problems and strengthens connections with your brand’s audience. It enables you to manage and control social posts across multiple platforms, networks, and campaigns, all in one place.

It is a perfect solution to drive the businesses’ strategic decision-making with your social data and analytics insights. Even though Sprout Social is an all-in-one automation tool, it might be a little expensive if your startup is on a limited budget!

2. Buffer

Many marketers have used Buffer for years. It allows you to quickly put your posts in the queue to schedule them on different platforms. Buffer has divided its product into three categories. Publish, Reply, Analyze. You can choose which plan suits you better according to your marketing needs.

Buffer has recently introduced a new feature that allows you to include the first comment with your scheduled Instagram posts. Most of the advanced features that third-party tools integrate buffer offers.

3. Loomly

Loomly offers integrations for a lot of social media management tools, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, which is a plus. However, Loomly is on our list due to its branding and content creation features.

4. Social Pilot

Social Pilot manages social media, schedules social media posts, improves engagement, and analyzes results. Socialpilot also supports bulk posting on different social channels. The template for bulk scheduling might sound a little problematic if you don’t have any prior experience in bulk scheduling. Social Pilot offers comprehensive analytics concerning different platforms. The only limit is the absence of social listening and not supporting video posts in bulk uploading.

5. Social Alert

Social Alert is a tracking tool that helps you to track your hashtags, keywords, and social accounts. If you want to avoid all the social noise and focus on the performance of your keywords and hashtags, Social Alert is the right tool for you. Hashtag tracking can help startups to grow their digital presence and tap into more customers.

You can use this tool to expand your post reach on social media by using relevant industry-related keywords. The tool generates a report with the number of posts, impressions, users, reach, and top mentions, which will help you succeed in your next marketing campaign.

6. Digital Marketing Vs. Social Media Marketing

Why Focus on Social Media Marketing?

1. Improves Reach

Social media allows businesses to target a specific market. Businesses need to establish a link with the right prospects and leads in order to achieve marketing goals quickly. Solely relying on the website will only give a business ten quality leads from hundreds of traffic. With social media, you can easily target those who you think will be interested in your service or product.

Furthermore, active marketing on social media accounts will result in numerous shares, likes, and comments on your content, thus, making them more visible in the news feed. As your content becomes viral, its reach becomes wider as well.

2. Drives Relevant Website Traffic

If you want relevant traffic to come to your website, then social media is king. For so many years, marketers have focused on driving traffic to websites, but with the advent of social media and everyone going mobile, resources have been spent for more referral traffic to sites.

How is it possible? Most businesses put direct links to the website in the social media accounts’ profiles, status updates, content posts, etc. Thus, social media users can just click on the links and be directed to the website.

Also, with the use of social media, a website’s search engine rank is boosted, making the site more visible during the search. Digital marketers need not exhaust all attention to a well-made custom web design and search engine optimization tactics. This is possible as most social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are now indexed by Google.

3. Improves Brand Awareness

Building on your social profile actually helps establish your brand. Brand awareness is essential for every business. Through social media, you can build your following by showing the entire social media community who you are as a brand.

Marketers should allocate resources to coming up with a personality online. Successful marketing strategies for brand awareness in social media usually involve showing the public what the business is inside and out, how they take care of and interact with customers, and how unique the brand is.

With social media, you can strengthen your brand and reinforce a positive image for your business to those who are interested in the type of service or product you have.

4. Increases Customer Engagement

There is minimal interaction on company websites. Furthermore, if there is any form of interaction on company websites, they are restricted. With social media, it is easier to communicate you’re your customers 24/7. Engaging with customers boosts your brand through more followers, likes, and shares. Customer engagement is one way of building your social media presence.

When a customer posts how much she likes your service and tags you, it is now easier to relay your thanks. Keep track of all interactions your customers do with your social media accounts, and make sure you show them that you are reading every single thing they say about your brand.

5. Helps with Search Engine Optimization

Social media marketing has become significant to search engine optimization strategies. As more social networking sites are being indexed by Google, the more social profiles you build, the better your ranking is on search.

Social networking sites have become search engines themselves as well. Take, for example, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram – you have the ability to search relevant keywords on these social networking sites. With the updates in social media, businesses have to improve their social presence right away and let social accounts dominate the search engine results.

Why Focus on Digital Marketing?

1. More flexibility in budget

Digital marketing is affordable and cheap. You can set your own budget for digital marketing. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc., provide digital marketing services within budget. They allow users to set their own bids for a digital marketing campaign. These search engines feed your website and services at the top of search results. Make a creative landing page for users to convert them into customers. 

2. Allows Audience Targeting

A marketing campaign without analyzing and targeting the audience is a big waste. Digital marketing will help you to reach a targeted audience. It helps both global and local businesses in lead generation. Search engine marketing, search engine optimization, banner promotion, video marketing, etc., are effective digital marketing campaigns that help businesses to reach their targeted audience. You can reach the most specific audience based on age, group, activity, interest, location, etc.

3. Helps with Lead Generation

Lead generation is the major focus of every business. Business managers make plans and strategies for marketing a product/service in the targeted market. Digital media is the best marketing place to attract customers. The use of digital marketing turns the audience into customers. Digital marketing is the only trusted tool in the market for lead generation. You can achieve your goals in the form of subscriptions, sales, etc., through digital marketing.

4. Offers Pay-Per-Click Service

Digital marketing services offer pay-per-click services to customers. A customer is liable to pay the service provider for the activity only. When a user clicks your link/ad, then they will deduct your amount. You are not paying for impressions. This is the plus side of digital marketing.

5. Larger Market Place

We are living in an internet age. Our devices, like tablets, mobiles, laptops, etc., are digital. Imagine the potential of digital media in the Indian market. You can reach millions in a small time range. Take services of digital marketing in India to expand your reach.

Conclusion

If you are still thinking in terms of digital vs. social marketing, just remember that social media marketing is just a single part of digital marketing. Both can bring something important to your campaign, depending on your company’s goals. Digital marketing has been around for decades, and it’s not going anywhere.

Social media is newer, but it’s become one of the most important types of marketing for many businesses. With few exceptions, no brand or company should put all of its focus into social media marketing, but it should be a central part of your process for the foreseeable future. Ideally, your social and other digital campaigns will work together, in harmony, to reach the most potential customers.

If you want to maximize your efforts in both digital marketing and social media marketing, then it would greatly help you to hire the assistance of a digital company like SMART VAs.