The difference between content marketing and social media marketing lies in the focuses and execution. Even if they have a common objective of promoting a brand, content marketing and social media marketing are different in many other aspects.
Content marketing is the art of exploiting special sorts of content such as blogs, videos, website pages, etc. to catch the attention of website visitors and ultimately transform them into customers whereas, social media marketing is the practice of earning traffic and leads for the company using social media. Let us have a look at the basic differences between the two:
1.Objectives
Although both social media marketing and content marketing can be used for a lot of purposes, social media marketing usually have a tendency to focus on two major objectives. First, it is used for creating product awareness and to facilitate discussion about the brand. Secondly, it is used for customer retention and can be used as a social platform for an open communication with clients, often around problems or inquiries that consumers have.
Content marketing facilitates demand creation. As excellent content brings results to a brand’s site, brands can build up an association with the prospects and care for the major customer conversion or product purchase.
2.Channel and a Tactic
Social media has revolutionized the marketing sector. The birth of social media made custom targeting of outlook customers easier for marketers. Social media thus provides a means of transportation to reach customers directly, rather than having to use a mediator. According to recent marketing surveys, social media has emerged as one of the most admired marketing channels for businesses. Social media marketing is the most feasible marketing strategy for learning and gathering insights for the business and to employ them to lure the customers. Social media marketing strategy works well when incorporated with other marketing plans.
3.Center Of Gravity
The center of gravity is an additional distinction between social media marketing and content marketing. In social media marketing, the center of gravity is surrounded by social media networks. Marketers are executing social media campaigns mainly through Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
On the other hand, the center of gravity for content marketing is the website of the business, though social networks play a major role in raising the hit of the content marketing it gets fame when the dealer shares links to this content across social networks.
4.Types of content
In social media marketing, content is created to fit the framework of the selected social network: small messages in the 140 characters limit for Twitter, Facebook, etc. Here, brands model the strategies to suit the person the social media user.
Conversely, in content marketing, the context of websites allows much longer types of content. Brands can publish blog posts, infographics,videos, and eBooks, just to name a few formats. Here, brands display their behavior after that of media publishers.
