Digital Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: A Complete Guide

Digital marketing and social media marketing are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. So what exactly is the difference between digital marketing and social media marketing?

Digital marketing refers to any online marketing effort, while social media marketing is just one channel within a larger digital marketing strategy.

In this complete guide, we will cover everything you need to know about digital marketing and social media marketing, including:

What is Digital Marketing?
Types of Digital Marketing
Benefits of Digital Marketing
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Platforms
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Difference Between Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing
Do You Need Both?

Let’s dive in!

Table of Contents

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the overarching process of promoting a business online to connect with potential customers and drive sales. It encompasses all marketing efforts delivered through digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps.

In essence, digital marketing utilizes the internet, mobile devices, and even offline platforms like TV and radio to enhance brand awareness and customer engagement.

The major components of a digital marketing strategy include:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – The process of optimizing website content to improve rankings on search engines like Google. This allows your content to appear more frequently in search results for relevant keywords.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Encompasses paid strategies like Google Ads where companies bid on keywords related to their business to drive traffic from search engines.
Content Marketing – Creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content like blog posts and videos to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.
Social Media Marketing – Promoting your brand and engaging an audience on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok etc.
Email Marketing – Sending commercial messages via email to notify customers about new products or services and drive sales.
Affiliate Marketing – Partnering with relevant blogs, influencers and online publications who promote your products/services and get a commission for generating sales.
Native Advertising – Paid ads that match the design, user experience and content form of the media format where they are displayed. For example sponsored content on a blog.
Marketing Automation – Automating repetitive marketing tasks to nurture leads through emails and social media messages ultimately converting them into customers.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising – Paid ads like Google Ads that are displayed on search engine results pages and other online platforms based on specific keywords. It works on an auction-style system where advertisers bid for ad placement.

Simply put, digital marketing leverages the connectivity and convenience of the digital world to strengthen all marketing efforts ranging from communications, data analysis to transactions.

Types of Digital Marketing

There are two main types of digital marketing:

1. Pull Digital Marketing

As the name suggests, pull marketing strategies attract (pull) customers by delivering relevant, valuable, and engaging content that answers their questions and needs. The goal is not to sell directly but build trust and relationships that eventually convert site visitors into customers.

Examples include:

Blogs
Videos
Interactive Tools
Email newsletters
SEO
Social media engagement

2. Push Digital Marketing

Push marketing broadcasts messages straight to target audiences, with the goal of immediately prompting interest and driving conversions, rather than simply attracting them.

Examples include:

PPC ads
Paid social media ads
Email promotions like sales, discounts, coupons etc.
Retargeting ads
Direct website pop-ups

An effective digital strategy includes both push and pull marketing techniques tailored to business goals and audience preferences. The inbound or pull activities attract people while the outbound push tactics promote products more aggressively to convert leads.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

Now that you know what digital marketing encompasses, let’s look at the key advantages it offers:

1. Global Reach & Hyper Targeting

Online marketing provides unmatched global opportunities, eliminating geographical barriers and enabling businesses to promote their products and services to wider target audiences across countries and continents.

Moreover, digital channels allow for hyper-targeted, personalized marketing. Sophisticated data analysis of audience interests, behaviors, demographics, web activity etc. facilitates tailoring communications to the needs of individuals and niche segments making campaigns more relevant and effective.

2. Measurability & Data-Driven Decisions

The analytical capabilities to track detailed metrics like impressions, clicks, conversions etc for each marketing channel and initiative are unmatched in traditional marketing. Real-time access to quantifiable data enables optimizing budgets and improving ROI through data-driven decisions.

3. Enhanced Customer Experiences

Digital touchpoints like websites, apps, email and social media facilitate interactive two-way engagements between customers and brands. Digital marketing enhances experiences by offering personalized communications, rapid responses to queries, quick resolution of issues and 24×7 accessibility via multiple contact options.

4. Cost Effectiveness

Digital marketing techniques like SEO, content marketing and social media engagement offer affordable ways for brands to connect with millions. Even paid channels are more cost-effective allowing small businesses to compete with larger players on an equal footing.

Setting up digital campaigns scales easily without exponential costs making it the go-to choice for agile startups and large organizations alike.

In summary, online marketing empowers brands to market smarter, target better, engage deeply and optimize continually – all contributing to lower acquisition costs and bigger profits.

Social media marketing refers specifically to marketing efforts on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok etc.

The main goals include:

Increasing brand awareness and visibility
Generating leads and sales
Building relationships with followers
Creating brand loyalty

It involves creating shareable content like images, videos, online events etc. tailored for each platform and the user expectations aligned to it. The content aims at actively engaging audiences by educating, entertaining or incentivizing them to like, comment and share the posts and stories.

With over 4.2 billion users spending roughly 2.5 hours daily on social media, these platforms are extremely influential channels that enable interacting with prospects to drive conversions.

Let’s look at some of the most popular networks used in social media marketing strategies:

Facebook – Over 2.8 billion monthly active users makes this the leading platform for promotional campaigns, influencer engagement and paid ads. Brand pages and Facebook groups facilitate community building.
YouTube – As the second largest search engine after Google, companies leverage YouTube to host videos showcasing products, demos, and tutorials to engage viewers.
Twitter – The platform is ideal for short, topical messages, sharing latest updates, support conversations and amplification through re-tweets. Brands gain from Twitter’s broad reach.
Instagram – An ideal avenue for visually appealing content like photos and reels since it has over 2 billion monthly active accounts. Leverage influencers and paid promotions here.
LinkedIn – With 740 million members, this professional network offers lead generation and relationship-building opportunities through compelling content sharing. Good for B2B marketing.
TikTok – The video-sharing app helps creative brands gain visibility. Dance challenges, music videos and collaborations with influencers grabs user attention.
Pinterest – Enables showcasing products visually. Tailor images and videos for the platform’s 433 million monthly actives who come to discover and save creative ideas.
Snapchat – Ephemeral messaging makes it ideal for exclusives and sneak previews. Create fun lenses and geofilters aligned to your brand personality for the platform’s 380 million daily active users.

This list keeps growing with exciting innovations like live audio spaces and AR filters opening new avenues for brands to explore.

Let’s look at some of the significant advantages of incorporating social media marketing:

Brand Awareness & Discovery

Social platforms expand your reach to millions of active users. Creating content aligned to platform algorithms facilitates getting discovered by more relevant people. Hashtags and tags boost visibility further by featuring your posts in larger conversations.

Thought Leadership

Share industry insights, data reports, trend analysis and success stories to establish domain expertise and credibility. This showcases the brand, products and people behind it as trustworthy thought leaders.

Lead Generation

Insert gated offers like free trials, coupons or content upgrades that motivate followers to share contact details facilitating lead capture and sales prospecting.

Improved SEO

Getting more people to follow, like, share and comment on social media content signals search engines that the content is engaging. This indirectly boosts search rankings and visibility.

Audience Engagement

Foster real connections through instant updates, responses to comments and messages along with value-adding content and contests to enhance audience engagement.

Competitive Edge

Stay on top of trends in your space with real-time monitoring of relevant conversations. Identify influencers, evaluate performance of competitors, and pivot your social media game accordingly.

In summary, social media marketing complements broader digital marketing programs by focusing specifically on known prospects hanging out on social sites and apps optimized for networking and community building.

While digital marketing and social media marketing strategies often overlap, there exist clear distinctions between both:

Digital Marketing	Social Media Marketing
Encompasses all promotional activities delivered online via websites, email, mobile etc and offline through digital channels.	Involves only marketing efforts on social networking platforms.
Starts from anonymous target groups identified through market research and classifying them based on similar attributes to create buyer personas.	Begins with profiling followers and fans on owned social media channels along with analyzing audience demographics data offered within platform analytics.
Adopts both push and pull online tactics like PPC ads, content marketing etc along with offline channels like Radio, TV etc.	Leverages only pull digital tactics focused on creating engaging social content optimized for driving shares, likes and comments.
Measures success through key metrics like ranking improvement, site traffic, lead conversions and sales that indicate growth towards business goals.	Tracks performance using social-specific metrics like reach, engagement rate, link clicks, follower growth etc as indicators to optimize social content.
Requires technically skilled resources for executing strategies encompassing UX, SEM, email marketing, automation tools etc.	Needs personnel skilled in community management, influencer engagement and content creation aligned to constantly evolving platform algorithms.
Adopts an outside-in approach where external target groups are identified to market business offerings to eventually convert them into customers.	Works inside-out beginning with owned social media followers viewed as brand ambassadors who are nurtured to promote products through shares and conversations.
Encompasses the entire purchase process from generating awareness to interest, consideration, decision making leading to conversions and customer loyalty programs like memberships, subscriptions etc.	Focuses largely on the awareness phase, especially for lead generation purposes. Further sales progression requires integration with additional digital channels and workflows.
ROI is calculated from tangible metrics like sales figures, cost per lead/acquisition, lifetime customer value etc.	Returns are measured indirectly through intermediate indicators like audience growth rates, content reach, engagement levels, influencer mentions etc.

In summary, digital marketing provides the full stack of promotional tactics spanning across online and offline channels while social media marketing is a subset focused just on driving awareness and engagement on networking platforms.

For most modern businesses targeting online audiences, having both a broad digital marketing strategy with social media marketing integrated as a key component is extremely beneficial for growth.

A digital marketing plan encompasses the entire customer journey – from raising awareness to driving interest and consideration through to conversions and repeat purchases. Social media fits into the larger scheme as an awareness building channel.

For example, SEO and content marketing organically attract visitors further down the decision-making process who are actively searching for specific solutions. Retargeting displays help reconnect with visitors who left your site without purchases via ads across websites reminding them about your offerings.

Onboarding followers across social platforms facilitates tapping into existing networked communities to increase visibility. Then social media ads and influencer promotions expose your brand to more targeted people hanging out on these channels through paid partnerships.

Furthermore, digital channels like email marketing and mobile apps enable personalized post-purchase customer engagement providing support and the latest brand updates to nurture loyalty.

In summary, interlinking social media marketing with other digital strategies creates a comprehensive ecosystem that attracts customers, convinces them to buy as well as fosters lasting profitable relationships.

Key Takeaways

Digital marketing encompasses all online marketing efforts and techniques like SEO, content marketing, paid search etc along with adoption of offline digital channels like TV, Radio etc.
Social media marketing focuses specifically on driving engagement through valuable content that inspires audience shares, likes and comments on social networking platforms.
While social media marketing is mostly about pull marketing focused on content, digital marketing adopts both push and pull online tactics based on campaign objectives.
Digital marketing targets anonymous people identified through generalized market research while social media marketing begins with owned audiences on branded profiles and pages.
Since social media facilitates community-driven conversations, metrics focus on volume growth, reach and levels of engagement as performance indicators while digital marketing relies on sales and lead generation figures to calculate ROI.
For rounded success that covers the complete buyer journey, brands should embrace an integrated digital strategy with social media marketing powering the awareness phase as a key component.

In today’s hyperconnected world, both digital marketing and social media marketing offer invaluable avenues for brands to connect with audiences worldwide. As online behaviors evolve, marketing campaigns must assess which digital channels and platforms align best to target customer priorities and preferences along the purchaser journey to optimize spend.

This comprehensive guide summarizes how these two promotional strategies complement each other. We hope it provides clarity to build data-driven integrated digital approaches that fuel success!

Digital Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: A Complete Guide

What is Digital Marketing?