When considering all of the potential ways digital marketing can be used, it can be difficult to understand which will offer the biggest benefits and greatest ROI to your brand. One of the most popular digital marketing channels to use is social media as it is a great way of showing the personality behind a brand. Having a strategy in place for your wider digital marketing will help enhance the success of your social media channels as well as offline marketing methods.

What does digital marketing involve?

According to Tech Target digital marketing is:

“Digital marketing is a general term for any the effort by a company to connect with customers through electronic technology, including email, geolocation and mobile marketing, social media, online customer communities, webinars and other video-based content.”

Forms of digital marketing could include:

  • Search engine marketing (SEM)
    • Including PPC and SEO
  • Email marketing
  • Online advertising through banners
  • Social media

While other forms of non-internet digital marketing may focus on:

  • Digital billboards
  • TV
  • Radio
  • Mobile phones

Each form of digital marketing takes on a completely different strategy. This infographic from Econsultancy gives a good idea of the type of route to take for different strategies and gives advice on how you can apply it to your own campaigns.

Digital marketing strategy infographic

Source: Econsultancy

Each section is broken down to provide a better understanding of what you can achieve from each of your digital strategies and looks into the platforms you can use to generate good results.

Something important to understand is that a different approach should be taken to every digital marketing channel. You cannot apply the same strategy to multiple channels as it just will not work. The audience, platform, goals and more should all be specifically focused for each channel in order to achieve the best results.

What does social media involve?

One thing to understand with social media is that it is defined as the platform, however social networking is a way of communicating through the different social media platforms.

Social Media Today gives two good definitions to distinguish between the two:

Social media is a way to transmit, or share information with a broad audience. Everyone has the opportunity to create and distribute

Social networking is an act of engagement. Groups of people with common interests, or like-minds, associate together on social networking sites and build relationships through community

When looking at how to be successful on social media, social networking plays a huge part. The whole point of using social media is to be social and actually interact with your audience through exchanging information and putting a face to the name for most companies/businesses.

A few of the most commonly used social media platforms include:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Youtube
  • Linkedin

These platforms have dramatically changed the way in which we share content with each other and how we interact with our audiences. They provide an instant form of communication, which is great for creating a personality for a brand.

When considering how much of your digital marketing effort should be focused on social channels, a strategy should be developed for the audience you are looking to attract while keeping in mind the content you are able to generate.

For example, a law firm could use their social media channels to tie in with their other forms of digital marketing such as email and content marketing. The main purpose of their social media channel could be to promote timely content and direct followers back to view the content on their website.

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In comparison, the innocent drinks brand are well known for using social media channels to inject personality into their content and increase interaction with their followers. With this approach, their social media could be of greater importance compared to the use of email marketing or SEO.

innocent-tweet

Depending on the audience and overall digital marketing objectives, the use of the social channels will differ between brands. Engaging with your audience using social media can be a quick and (sometimes) cost effective form of digital marketing. A social strategy however, should only form one part of a wider digital marketing mix which should be completed alongside social campaigns to bring in even better results.

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