What’s the Difference Between Digital, Social Media, and Content Marketing?
In our digital age, websites, social media, and online presence all are key aspects of marketing, no matter if you’re a B2B company or a B2C company. It’s easy to get all the different kinds of marketing confused. If you tend to conflate the terms of digital, social media, and content marketing, this blog post is for you. Read on to learn the difference between digital, social media, and content marketing.
What’s the Difference Between Digital, Social Media, and Content Marketing?
Let’s draw a virtual map of these topics. To start off, digital marketing is the largest country on the map. It takes up most of the picture. Social media marketing is the capital city of the digital marketing country. It’s where most of the important connections are made. Content marketing is the road system that connects all the smaller cities to the capital. It’s the route you take to get to each stop, in each city of digital marketing. Let’s dig into the ways each type of marketing works.
Digital Marketing
As this graphic below from technofaq.org shows, digital marketing encompasses many other types of marketing (including social media marketing and content marketing). It also includes options like PPC advertising, link building, and video marketing.
Digital marketing consists of your online presence. There are many strategies included in digital marketing. Defining your target audience is key before digital marketing can begin. Website development and design fall under the category of digital marketing as well. Development and design decisions are made from a digital marketing mindset. Search Engine Optimization is a major part of digital marketing. Both on-page SEO and off-page SEO can bump your status on applicable search engine results.
Digital marketing engages your customers, builds your platform, and converts to sales. Because of its importance, it deserves time, resources, and attention given to it. The online presence you create as a company directly shows your potential customers who you are and what you stand for. Understand its importance and all its facets allows you as a company to continue marketing with excellence in this digital age.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing has become a key part of marketing, even for B2B companies. This is because this type of marketing focuses on growing your audience and brand. While social media marketing may not directly convert to sales, it builds your connections and informs your sales. Before making buying decisions, most buyers will look at a company’s social media. In the B2B buying cycle, social media can be actually be a large part of the decision process.
In addition, it’s easy to grow your circle through following those in your industry. As well as growing your following directly, your audience can also share your posts and accounts. This exponentially grows your reach. To create sharable content, dive into content marketing.
Content Marketing
Content marketing’s purpose is to attract a specific audience and earn trust by providing valuable information. Creating high-quality content shows your audience that you’re experts at what you do. From this base, leading the industry in thought and trends can really up your marketing game. Content marketing is present on your website and your social media pages. Building up a blog full of informational content and social media pages with links to helpful articles and infographics engages your audience. Content marketing also improves SEO because keywords and topics can be naturally included in the industry-related content you’re creating.
If you’d like to talk with us about digital marketing options, give us a call at 262-363-4238 or reach out to us at [email protected]. Our services include branding, marketing, and website development with an emphasis on industrial sector companies. We’d love to talk with you!