When it comes to digital marketing, two main strategies are highly effective: Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Both of them aim to get your brand noticed, drive traffic, and ultimately, increase sales. However, they work in different ways and focus on different parts of the online consumer journey.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at each strategy, highlighting their key differences, benefits, and things to bear in mind.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social Media Marketing is all about promoting your products or services on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest. There are different things you can do to make this work, such as posting content for free, paying for ads, partnering with influencers, and community engagement.
1. Engagement and Interaction
Social media marketing deals with connecting with your audience. Brands use social media platforms to build relationships, show that they can be trusted, and create a sense of community with their followers. By using likes, comments, shares, and direct messages, businesses can communicate directly with customers, address their concerns, and get feedback instantly. Its components include:
2. Content Creation and Creativity
Social media is a visual and creative medium, making content creation a key aspect of SMM. Brands use eye-catching visuals, videos, infographics, and storytelling to captivate audiences and get their message across. Being authentic and creative is key to making your brand stand out from the crowd and getting noticed in the sea of social media noise.
3. Targeted Advertising
Social media platforms have some pretty cool features for advertising. Advertisers can choose who sees their ads based on age, gender, interests, behavior, and important life events. This helps brands reach the right people with messages that are just for them, making their ads way more effective.
4. Brand Awareness and Engagement Metrics
SMM focuses on metrics like shares, likes, comments, followers, and engagement rate to see how people are reacting to a brand. These metrics give you an idea of how much people like your brand and how much they’re getting involved with it online.
5. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a popular way to promote products or services on social media. Basically, brands team up with people who have lots of followers to endorse their products. These influencers can help brands get in front of new audiences, build trust, and get people to buy products by sharing their honest opinions and recommendations.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing is all about boosting the visibility of websites on search engine results pages (SERPs) by using paid ads (PPC) and optimizing content for search engines (SEO). The most popular tools for PPC advertising are Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords) and Bing Ads. It includes:
1. Intent-Based Targeting
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) targets users who are actively seeking information or solutions related to specific keywords. This is achieved by placing ads at the top or bottom of search results pages, matching with users’ searches, and offering solutions to their immediate needs.
2. Keyword Targeting and Bidding
Keyword research and bidding are fundamental to SEM. Advertisers bid on relevant keywords related to their products or services, and ads are shown when users search for those keywords. Bids determine ad placement, the higher your bid, the higher up your ad will appear in the search results, so you can get more eyes on your product or service.
3. Performance-Based Advertising
SEM works on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, which means advertisers only pay when people click their ads. This approach lets advertisers keep track of how well their campaigns are doing in real-time and make changes based on important measures like click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and return on ad spend (ROAS).
4. Conversion Tracking and Attribution
SEM provides great conversion tracking and attribution capabilities that help advertisers track and understand how well their ads are doing. It helps them figure out which ads, keywords, and campaigns are getting them the most conversions. This way, they can focus on the ones that work and get rid of the ones that don’t.
5. Local and Geo-Targeting
SEM provides advanced targeting options that enable businesses to reach their desired audience in specific locations. Advertisers can target users based on their geographic location, closeness to their business, or targeting radius. This makes SEM an effective strategy for local businesses to attract nearby customers.
Conclusion
To put it simply, Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are two separate but complementary strategies in the digital marketing world. SMM is all about creating relationships, encouraging interactions, and raising brand awareness on social media platforms. On the other hand, SEM aims at targeting users with specific search queries, driving immediate traffic and conversions through paid ads in search engine results. By understanding the unique strengths and capabilities of each approach, marketers can create integrated marketing strategies that use both SMM and SEM to achieve their business goals effectively.