In today’s online buzz of marketing, the combat between Search VS Social Media are increasing day by day and they are almost certainly the biggest talks by the business people to promote their product or services.

Combat of Online Marketing Strategies

Initially search was created with intention to share or provide information, and later it turned out to be a body of knowledge for all mankind. While, social Media has born from the Marketing Strategies and gained revolution mostly from the last decade with social networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.

With span of time, search and social have been used as online marketing strategies for business that complement each other. However, there lies the strong conflict in the Market, whether to invest in social media strategy more than the other, or to only pursue search marketing strategy but not the other.

Well, let’s shed some light on both the aspects of the online strategies and share your views and opinions regarding the present ongoing combat between SEM VS SMM.

Search Engine Marketing: SEM is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

In simple, the Search Engine Marketing is the process of gaining traffic from or visibility on search engines, where in the SEM covers two broad areas:

  • Attracting traffic through organic/ natural SEO efforts
  • Gaining traffic through paid search advertising

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines through the natural (organic), or un-paid resources. All major search engines have such results, where web pages and other content like videos or local listings are appeared and ranked based on what the search engine considers most pertinent to users.

What is Paid Search Advertising?

Paid Search Advertising is also known as Paid Search Marketing – It is the process of gaining traffic by purchasing ads on search engines and websites. The ads are sold on the CPC/PPC/CPA/CPL and many more bases.

Before proceeding further to take a call on SEM VS SMM, have a look at the pros and cons of both the online marketing strategies.

Pros of Search Engine Marketing:

  • Information Retrieval – A user query prompts search engine to return results that are ranked higher hierarchically using trust and relevance signals.
  • Search Engines are the first preference to know the information on anything.
  • Tendency to make a purchase is high.
  • Fastest form of providing information.
  • Advertisers can get an edge over the high competition by purchasing ads on the prominent places/areas to win the battle in this cut-throat business world, which will help the potential customers to see or buy the product.
  • Search Engine helps in establishing a good and friendly search status.
  • SEM is indeed an important strategy to increase classified traffic to your website. If you have an online business, more targeted visitors mean higher possibility of buyers.
  • Brand awareness for a product or company / Awareness regarding a Company / product.

**Every good thing has its Flaws**

Cons of Search Engine Marketing:

Only top Ranked Websites or Business get the maximum clicks in SERPs.

  • It is time consuming process as it takes time for New Businesses to appear on top in search results due to the stiff competition in the online world.
  • Small business houses cannot afford to run PPC as it is highly expensive.
  • We can’t communicate directly with the customers – Building relationship with customers is not possible–Absence of Community Building.

Social Media Marketing: SMM refers to the process of gaining business traffic or attention through social media sites.

Social media strikes as an easy accessing platform for every business to promote their services or products. In online marketing, social media focuses on the efforts of building brand image by engaging potential customers via attractive and attentive content that helps the reader to gain the knowledge regarding the product. This sort of targeted marketing is carried by word of mouth, which indicates that the consequences are earned through free social media than the paid media marketing strategies.

In the present generation, the highly sophisticated communication modes have become the resources for the Business to nurture brand awareness and also to enhance their customer service. On the other hand, communicating to the targeted customers or providing awareness regarding your product via social media is less expensive for the business.

Pros of Social Media Marketing:

  • Social marketing gives chance to interact with potential customers and give them a glance at the business.
  • SMM is very useful for a new thing or for a new product. As it’s a new invention, people will not “search” for it. If you use social media marketing to promote that product it will provide the awareness and grab the clientele.
  • Social interactions & media sharing from the social network participants create the kind of content that can cheer up brand’s visibility via blog posts, profiles, videos, or other media.
  • Social Media Marketing which is getting more popular, effective, cheaper and easier to use and implement.
  • Social networks like Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Stumbleupon have the search boxes, which are capable of getting more real time and local results than that of any search engine can offer.
  • Viral marketing – News in the social media spread like bushfire across the world because of the viral potential of the media.

**As with everything in life the good must be paired with the bad**

Cons of Social Media Marketing:

  • Social Media is very time consuming:  To use Social Media as a marketing media, you need to be patient as it takes long time and a lot of effort to find interested customers and to build relationships with your patrons.
  • In Social media the law of reciprocity applies “Give & Take “- When a user has a response to an update regarding your Business, you should be there to reply to their queries enough to satisfy the curiosity. If this is not done properly, the audience will lose their faith in the Brand and will reflect poorly on our Brand name.
  • Social Media is a living breathing beast: If you feed the beast then the beast works for you, but you need to feed it often – Business need to spend a lot of time updating its audience on the relevant issues and the updates might even occur hourly. When you are established and pull a large crowd, it will be a difficult process trying to meet the needs of all the people in your crowd.
  • Hard to find the complete information regarding a product or service of a Business.
  • Negative or bad taste in the social media spread like fire around the world because of the viral potential of the media. One malicious posting from an individual can cause the good name of your business or company to be flawed in a matter of hours.

Well, now after having a complete look at the Pros & Cons of Search and Social, I hope you can take your call whether to have only Search Engine Marketing for your business or vice-versa. However, from my personal experiences I feel that a mixture of Search & Social will surely rock the business.

Apart, from the above Pros of the Search Engine & Social Media Marketing the following are the advantages of including both the Strategies for running a successful business.

Advantages of Having Both SEM & SMM:

  • Brand Building & Creating Buzz via word of mouth.
  • It allows your business to reach out to a massive number of prospects.
  • It is a more effective means of reaching specifically targeted demographics.
  • If one source starts to fail, you could always boost your efforts in another area and know that you will not lose all of your visitors completely.
  • Unify the marketing message across all media types and stay committed and active in the online communities.
  • SMM plus SEO will equal more free traffic and better Search Engine Rankings.
  • We can stay connected with your patrons.

In the long run of SEM VS SMM – Do you think Search is Best than Social or vice-versa? Let’s us know your views and opinions on the Combat of Online Marketing Strategies – Search VS Social Media, as we serve your Opinion’s Very hot!

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