Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Marketing are two important pillars of any digital marketing strategy. I came across this question on Quora- “Social media marketing and search engine marketing, which one is best?” and I thought to take a stab at this and have this question answered here for you. 

Let me get straight to the very basic definition of social media marketing and search engine marketing.

What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)? 

SMM means reaching your target audience via social media platforms by creating content that is focused on solving their problems. Social media marketing can involve both paid and organic means to reach your right audience, however, engagement and consistency go a long way in helping you build brand awareness.

How do marketers use SMM?

Social media marketing is used  to connect and build a brand community online, generate brand awareness, drive traffic to the website, and so on. SMM is not restricted to listening and engaging with your potential clients or followers, running paid ad campaigns, and analyzing what content or ad campaign helped generate more revenues for the business. The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.

Depending on the demographics of your audience and where they interact on several social media platforms, you will need to sprinkle and test out organic and paid ways of converting them to your customer base.

Organic SMM

As the name suggests, organic SMM or social media marketing involves the organic engagement and regular consistent postings on social media profiles.

As an example, I have taken a screenshot of this Organic post by Amazon from Instagram. 

Paid SMM

Paid SMM or Paid ads on social media means that you are paying for boosting your post or placing ads on a targeted audience feed.

An example is down below. A screenshot of a paid Instagram ad looks like this. It reads ‘Sponsored’ at the top. 

What is Search Engine Marketing?

SEM on the other hand, involves using paid campaigns on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. The search engine marketing involves the use of keywords to optimize your ad campaigns and increase organic search visibility to those who are searching for your business on these search engines. 

How do marketers use SEM? 

Search engine marketing or SEM is a digital marketing strategy used by marketers to increase the visibility of your website or landing pages in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engine marketing is also alternately referred to as paid search or pay per click (PPC). SERPs may look different for each search result or query, but they’re all made up of the same three building blocks. These blocks are:

• Paid ads
• Organic results
• SERP features

Let me explain. 

Paid Ads

Some of us know about these paid ads as they stand out sometimes. These search results appear before, and sometimes also after the organic results. Paid ads on Google or any other search engine are marked as such.

In the screenshot below, I have the paid ad marked with a red rectangle.

With Paid ads or a Pay-Per-Click strategy, you as an advertiser would bid on keywords and pay Google for each click. The highest bidders generally receive prime placement, although Google also takes other factors like the relevance of the ad and CTR into account.

Organic results

As the name suggests, organic search results are pages from Google’s index. Because there are often thousands of matching results, Google sorts them using factors such as number of backlinks (the higher the better), relevance of the content, search intent, topical authority, fresh updated content ( the newer content with new images) and so on. To know more about ranking factors read here.  

In the screenshot below the organic results are highlighted in red. 

SERPS Features

These are other details that appear with the search query on Google such as Feature snippets, image pack, knowledge panel, people also ask, shopping results, Tweet boxes, site links, videos, top stories, etc. 

Examples of SERPs 

Which one is better- SMM or SEM?

Honestly, in my experience, both are necessary and cannot be better than the other. The implementation of these strategies are really important to create online visibility for any business but it does, at some point, boils down to a few factors such as-

• The demographics of your audience
• Their habits (where do they search for products SEO or on social media, how they trust SEO and not social media etc)
• The goals of your business 
• The type of industry you are in 

Social media marketing is all about humanizing your brand to an extent that it strikes a conversation with your potential client or followers online. It is a brilliant way for any small business to showcase thought leadership and help generate brand awareness. While you can absolutely utilize social media to acquire qualified leads, the first mindset should be to engage with the audience.

Search Engine Marketing makes it easy for your followers or non-followers to look you up on search engines when they are challenged with a problem. Because SEM utilizes optimized keywords that are set on ad campaigns or even website links or blog links such so that when a user searches for a solution to the problem he/she identifies, SEM generates solution results which then prompts the user to look at your website for the solution or click on your ad for making an inquiry call. In this case, it is very crucial to nurture your audience with the right content and interaction so that they can convert into a customer.

Now on the other side, your social media profiles aren’t just confined to social media. If you closely look yourself up on any search engine, your profiles also rank in results. They are prominently visible in branded search results, often on the first page. Thus, if you optimize your social media profiles and are driving traffic to your website by using quality links and content, then that increases your search engine visibility.

In my opinion, both marketing strategies are different but one cannot be better than the other. For the above-explained reasons, they go hand in hand. As a marketer, it’s best to use the combination of both to get more results.

Would you choose either of these strategies or use both in your online marketing?