Digital Marketing Is NOT Just “Social Media”
By: Growaholic Lab
Tags: Business, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Startup

As a marketer, you must’ve dealt with clients who wants your digital marketing services. You get excited that you’ve got a lead, you setup a meeting only to realize that what they truely want is Social Media Management, and it is frustraiting to say the least, that all of your digital marketing expertise is compromised to social media.

Whenever this is the case, I feel a clash in expectations. The client will think that anyone can do social media mangement so it shouldn’t be an expensive service, while I feel social media should be part of a full digital marketing strategy.

To start with digital marketing is a wide umbrella covering not only internet marketing, buy also other channels like TV and SMS. Social Media in turn, is just one of the internet marketing channels which include content marketing, email, and SEO as well.

The Digital Marketing Umbrella

Social Media Management VS Social Media Marketing

To clear some confusion there is a difference between SM Management and SM marketing. Social Media Management involves creating accounts on social platforms, creating and distributing content on those platforms, and managing engagement with your audience. In other words, it has to do with brand awareness, content marketing and customer relationship management.

On the other hand Social Media Marketing is more about generating leads via social media channels. Its goal is to direct traffic to your website or physical business. It also involves advertising and spending management to push your content to your target audience. SM Marketing is an effecting push marketing strategy.

SM Marketing strategy should be created an executed by a marketer, while SM accounts are ideally managed by a team of a designer, content creaters and a community manager.

Social Media VS Digital Marketing

To put simply, social media is merely a channel to execute your digital marketing strategy from one end, and a platform to build your online presence from the other end. It acts as a website alternative in this regard. Most companies have websites these days, and should have social media accounts, but without a digital marketing strategy, the traffic reaching your website will be very limited.

That being said, digital marketing is a big umbrella that — to be done right, needs a comprehensive strategy to be in place before starting excuting. That strategy may and should include social media channels. Nevertheless, if a client only wants social media, the strategy will be limited. We won’t be in a position to walk potential customers through a tracked customer journey map. We’ll end up missing on lots of potential customers along the way.

Conclusion

Any successful project starts with planning a proper strategy. The strategy would be agile and adaptive, but it should be there. Same goes with digital marketing. The art and skill lies in the strategy not the implementation, and as long as the client is only interested in social media, the strategy will be limited. It’ll be flawed. But, what do we do if that’s what the client wants? Personally, the feeling of being enchained to limited channels entails us to reject the deal. At the end of the day, we like to be happy, creative and free to be innovative in our marketing solutions and we tend to stick to our values.