Social Media Marketing Vs Digital Marketing: What’s the Difference?
Before you start thinking about social media marketing, it’s important to think of digital marketing (AKA online marketing) as a whole. Social media is a type of digital marketing, which is an umbrella term with many different branches. Digital marketing channels include social media marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), affiliate marketing, PPC (pay-per-click), search engine marketing (SEM), Short message service (SMS), and much more. At my company, Word of Mouth, I mainly work with two types of digital marketing: SEO and social media.
The goal of digital marketing is to increase a brand’s awareness by promoting it online to a target audience. This form of marketing is fairly new and is growing rapidly as the Internet expands with new platforms to advertise your products and services. Before digital marketing, people advertised their company through paper flyers, banners, billboards, and other forms of physical marketing (AKA traditional marketing) materials. The powerful part about promoting your stuff online is being able to reach new customers and widen your reach without leaving your house. There are 5.00 billion internet users in the world today, according to Data Reportal, which means that you can get in front of people across the globe. And according to Smart Insights, more than half of the world (4.62 billion) people are on social media channels. For comparison, there are also 3.9 billion active users on email. The opportunities are endless if you can reach the right people with your offerings.
Even though social media is one part of digital marketing, it‘s likely the biggest component. Just within social media alone, there are many different social media platforms including Linkedin, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and our generation‘s newest obsession — TikTok.
For the purposes of this article, we’re mainly going to be focusing on social media marketing that falls under digital marketing.
What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?
Social media marketing is the process of promoting your brand or services on social media marketing. Through this type of marketing, you’re increasing awareness of and educating people about your brand. The use of social media can allow you to convert followers into clients and drive your target audience to make an action. That action can be visiting your website to read an article, buying your product, or signing up for your email list. Increasing website traffic, which is typically a brand’s main hub, can open the doors to other calls to action.
Social media isn’t the end goal — it’s at the top of your sales funnel. It’s where people go to familiarize themselves with your brand and get inspired by what you’re doing. There are so many other components that go into making a sale and social media is just one marketing tool. Social media is a way of driving people to your sales page for your new course or your Shopify to see new arrivals of your products. Social media is organic marketing (unless you’re paying for ads!), which means that social media managers use strategies to naturally build a following, social media engagement, and audience action.
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is when you take different digital marketing channels and come up with goals for each platform and what you want them to accomplish. For example, one part of your strategy can include choosing which channels you want to implement in your business and clarifying their purpose. This really depends on your budget and bandwidth and how big of a team you have. Ideally, you want to be utilizing every form of digital marketing, but if you’re a small business or startup then that’s not entirely realistic. You might not have the budget to pay for Pay per click advertising (PPC like google ads) and SEM or have a big enough following to utilize affiliate marketing.
On the other hand, email marketing, SEO, and social media are all free and can be utilized right away!
Digital Marketing Strategy Vs Marketing Plan
While strategy is about outlining your goals, a digital marketing plan outlines when and how you will be executing your goals. So, for example, your social media marketing strategy might be to increase followers in Q3 and your plan would be to use Instagram and influencer marketing to achieve that.
For SEO, your goal might be to increase organic website traffic or increase the number of keywords showing up on page #1 of Google. Your plan can be to start off each month by searching the best keywords and writing a certain amount of articles per month that fall under a specific topic.
What Is a Social Media Marketing Campaign?
Now that we understand what a social media strategy is and a marketing plan is.... what is a campaign? A digital marketing campaign implements a marketing strategy and marketing plan during a specific time frame. For example, let’s say you’re coming out with a new product in a month, you might want to put together a social media marketing campaign to endorse your new product. Or, let’s say you’re working on a sponsorship with another brand, you can create a campaign to promote your branded content. Social media campaigns typically include a series of focused social media assets that are scheduled ahead of time.
A great example of a social media marketing campaign would be the #ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that went viral in 2014. The goal (marketing strategy) behind the campaign was to raise awareness and donations for ALS. The marketing plan included working with celebrities to post videos of them pouring a cold bucket of ice on their heads and nominating others to do the same. The campaign encouraged social sharing, had its own hashtag and donation link and spread brand awareness. In order to have a campaign, you need a strategy and plan! Marketing campaigns are typically executed by companies and brands that already have a following, so it’s interesting to see how the ALS foundation managed to gain popularity by utilizing different aspects of social media marketing and showing everyone the power of social networking.