Knowing the Difference: Social Media vs. Digital Marketing
Credit: @neonbrand
While you might believe that digital marketing and social media are two in the same, the truth is that social media covers just one aspect of digital marketing. The term is really more of an umbrella for a collection of things like SEO, email marketing, content marketing, public relations, social media as mentioned, and so much more. But don’t fret, even those who work in the business interchange the terms social media and digital marketing. What is most important here is that you’re not only using social media to serve as the single form of digital marketing for your business.
Although social media is important, it serves its own purpose. While on a social platform, think about how you interact with others–not your business, just you. I’m having to guess you use different platforms for different things, but ultimately, the end result is the same: you use social media to connect with people. Whether it’s your friends or even members of your family or acquaintances, you’re liking things, commenting and interacting with one another. Ultimately, this is the goal you’d like to have for your business as well, but it’ll work a little differently.
Contrary to popular belief, you can actually use your business’ social platforms much like your own. By engaging in discussion boards and keeping up with what’s going on in your community, or area of business, you’re keeping your name relevant simply promoting yourself in an organic way. When you’re not communicating, you should be giving viewers and followers a reason to communicate with you by sharing your products, posts that compliment or represent your business, as well as other types of content creation. When you’re not doing that, it's also a good idea to optimize your social pages so that you get better results regarding your target audience and future interactions. Another option is to pay social platforms for sponsored content, which is where I believe people begin to get the two terms confused. Although it does become a form of digital marketing, you have to remember that it is limited to just that platform, or collection of platforms.
Overall, the use of social media is important in any business and is the link that allows communication and interaction to merge on e-commerce sites. Through the use of one or multiple platforms, you’re able to give your business a voice and stay connected with your customer base, in addition to discovering new potential customers.
Shifting to digital marketing, the form of advertising can be approached in many different forms. Like in social media, as we just explained, digital media can also be implemented across a collection of online and offline channels. As a business, you can optimize your SEO, SEM, e-commerce, and other forms of online advertising, but can also choose to take things offline and engage your customer base through broadcasting, text messages or on television.
Typically in digital marketing however, there are three that have become a general powerhouse to advertising your business, which are: digital marketing, direct mail and social media. While you can use a lot of the previously mentioned aspects of the term to better optimize your results, these three would ultimately be where you started before you got into the nitty gritty of defining where your audience is coming from and how you can better target them in the future.
When thinking about how you’ll want to define your digital marketing plan, consider these things first:
Growing your sales and profit;
Building awareness and developing a relationship with your audience;
Adding value through implementation of inbound marketing strategies that will push customers to seek you out; and
Promoting your brand, product or service.
Although there are many others to consider, this is a great place to start and will only further help you to better define what practices work and don’t work when you’re able to see how they’ve met your business goals. It is important to remember that these things will take time to develop, as digital marketing in itself is really a strategy. How will you best achieve the results you want to see happen for your business?
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