Marketing is a process of promoting products or services, which ascertains consumer needs by giving them satisfying results. Traditional marketing strategies are not enough if one wants their product to reach the maximum crowd. One of the evolving branches of marketing is digital marketing, which has become a medium for advertising and selling directly to consumers on a global scale.

Digital Marketing is a platform that uses electronic channels to promote products or services, through internet-based and non-internet based channels.  Digital marketing can be classified into the following major components

• Search engine optimization
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing and mobile marketing
• Lead generation
• Growth hacking

The above-mentioned components fall under the internet-based category whereas promoting products over television, radio, via SMS, MMS etc., and fall under the non-internet based category. Thus, companies can use this platform to increase the sales of their brand or product/ services online as well as offline.

Social media marketing is a process that uses platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and all other social media channels to reach consumers and improve business relationships with them. People who advertise on Social media often think of it as digital marketing, which is not the case. Social media is one part of digital marketing and its use is limited to the availability of the internet.

In this article, I will try to help you to understand the difference between Digital Marketing and Social media marketing in a simple and sound manner.

Digital Marketing Campaign

It can be defined as a business campaign with the implementation of several online channels to promote products. As we have discussed above the major components of digital marketing, each business is different from having a different audience. One should keep in mind that we don’t need to advertise on all channels to promote our product as each audience will respond differently to different marketing channels.

Ideal digital marketing is always a combination of different channels, which mainly depends upon the type of business and audience to be targeted. For this reason, first, you should build a strategy and start implementing various digital marketing platforms and test, change and test again and measure which strategies are working best for your business. Later Drop the marketing strategies that are not giving desired results.

Today’s marketing world is purely based on research. The Internet has become an important part of our daily life. Where we do a lot of browsing before shopping online any product so companies depend upon internet-based tools such as search engine optimisation (SEO), pay per click (PPC), content, billboards, social media, emails etc., thus one can say starting a digital marketing strategy will take time to evolve and the results are not instant.

Social Media Campaign

As said earlier, social media marketing is just one part, one component of digital marketing, which avails social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and much more. Its working is typically based on grabbing audience attention by engaging with followers, holding some kind of contest, adding content or going live on these platforms and anything which is going to grab the attention of people.

Companies focussing on the promotion of their brand or product should not only focus on social media rather; it should be used in combination with many other digital marketing platforms. Though we all know using social media gives a quicker response and makes the product reach the global level in a fraction of seconds but pairing it up with digital marketing gives a far better result.

Nowadays the use of social media in any business is a must because of its popularity but it’s a time-consuming process if we don’t have an investment to hire someone to handle it. Another way around when we look into the features of digital marketing like SEO, PPC, mobile and email marketing, billboards etc., one would realise that the advantages from it cannot be achieved via social media marketing.  The process of social media is to seek out consumers whereas using digital marketing techniques will make the customers come to you. This type of marketing can be termed as inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing will help you to grow your brand effectively when you own your data through your own website. It may take time to reach your audience but using a customised mix of various digital marketing channels will help you reach a wider range of audiences.

• To summarize below I have shown a comparison chart.

Comparison Factor	Digital Marketing	Social Media Marketing
Definition	Promotion of products or services using a customized mix of various digital marketing channels online and offline	Promotion of product or services through social media platforms, blogs etc.,
Process-based on	Both online and offline channels marketing	Online channels marketing
Reach	wider	limited
Targeted Platform	Concerned with targeting customers through various platforms	Concerned with targeting online users
Result/ Outcome	Comparatively slow	Instant

So which one is better? Digital marketing or Social media marketing

To conclude, social media is just one component of digital marketing, both marketing strategies can be applied together depending upon the type of goals and company has to achieve.

Though social media is new, its usage plays a very important role in promoting any brand. One should not put all their focus on a single type of marketing. Club both strategies to make the most of it, to reach the maximum number of audience.

What Is Marketing?

Marketing is a process of promoting products or services, which ascertains consumer needs by giving them satisfying results.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is a platform that uses electronic channels to promote products or services, through internet-based and non-internet based channels.

What Is social Media Marketing?

social media marketing is just one part, one component of digital marketing, which avails social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and much more. Its working is typically based on grabbing audience attention by engaging with followers, holding some kind of contest, adding content or going live on these platforms and anything which is going to grab the attention of people.

So which one is better? Digital marketing or Social media marketing.

To conclude, social media is just one component of digital marketing, both marketing strategies can be applied together depending upon the type of goals and company has to achieve.

Which type of digital marketing is best?

Digital marketing can be classified into the following major components, •Search Engine Marketing(SEM) (Seo(Search Engine Optimization),PPC(Pay Per Click)) •Social Media Marketing(SMM) •Content Marketing •Email Marketing •Analytics •Brand Building •Digital PR