Acronyms for digital marketing channels include SEM and SMM.
- Search engine marketing is SEM. SEO and PPC advertising (the paid ads at the top of Google when you search) are examples of this.
- The acronym SMM stands for social media marketing. Non-paid social media marketing efforts and paid Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram advertisements are all examples of social media marketing.
Let’s study SMM and SEM in depth:
What Is SMM?
The term "Social Media Marketing" is spelled SMM. Wikipedia defines social media marketing as the promotion of a product or service through websites and social media platforms. Due to its sheer volume, social media traffic can change the game for your business. According to a recent survey, approximately 3.8 billion people use social media. That's almost half of the world's population, and you shouldn't miss out on this market!
The fundamental concept of social media marketing (SMM) is to locate and redirect potential visitors from various social media platforms to your website or online market. What exactly do you do?
How does SMM function?
Collaboration with social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is the fundamental tenet of SMM, and post naturally, interact with your target audience, or place paid advertisements on them.
It is estimated that people use social media platforms for 2.24 hours per day. Social media marketing is probably the easiest way to reach such a large audience with 3.8 million users.
Even though you can only achieve a short-term objective with social media ads, they can still bring in quality inquiries for your business.SMM, contrary to popular belief, is not nearly as expensive as some claim and is quite scalable.
What is SEM?
The majority of people are under the impression that SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, is the practice of placing paid advertisements on search engines to place your website at the top and side of search engine results pages in order to gain greater visibility and prominence than organic results.
However, only a portion of this is true. 50% of search engine marketing is PPC or paid ads.
SEO is the other half! Basically, SEM encompasses both SEO and PPC.
Therefore, SEM is a combination of PPC and SEO.
With PPC, we pay a sum to the search engine in order for our website to appear among the top results. The SERP will display these paid results first.
Let's say your company specializes in online tire sales. In order for your company's website to rank for a potential keyword such as "buy tires online," "best tires online," or other similar terms would require time. However, with PPC, you pay search engine companies to place your advertisements at the top of the SERPs.
How does SEM function?
We could go on and on about the intricacies of SEM's operation, but for the time being, let's keep things simple.
As previously stated, in PPC, brands pay search engines to place their advertisements at the top of the results page for searches.
In a nutshell, this is how PPC works; now let's look at some common terms.
SEM versus SMM: The big question.
In a nutshell, the location at which they draw customers is the primary distinction between the two. SMM draws visitors from social media platforms, whereas SEM does so by manipulating the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Let's now examine a few more significant distinctions between the two!
- On Facebook and other social media platforms, SMM runs ads that look good. Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other platforms SEM manipulates search results to ensure that their client's website is seen by users both organically and paid.
- Because of their large user base, social media marketing (SMM) ensures much higher visibility because the ads are shown to potential customers without the user's input or prompting. However, in the case of SEM, in order for your webpage to be served, users must search for a specific keyword or phrase on a search engine.
Finally, here is the distinction between SEM and SMM.
You can also learn about SEO vs SEM and how they work together.