Introduction

Every Business remains incomplete without proper marketing. Marketing works as a tool to create a positive impact on the audiences, making them curious about the products of a particular business. So, the success lies in how close an audience a business can reach.

Implementing technology and social media has made it even more accessible and cheaper for brands to market their products. Social media marketing and influencer marketing make it very simple for brands to reach a significant amount of audience in a concise time.

You can build your career solely on marketing since the demand in this field is consistent.

Although both the terms influence marketing and social media marketing may sound identical, there are significant differences between both of them.

For example, social media marketing only requires the brand to promote their product and a specific group of audience or general audiences. But influencer marketing adds intermediaries into the equation.

Key Differences!

A brand needs to use different social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, etc. The brands are the ones who post on their social media platforms or use ads and thereby promote their products.

But influencer marketing requires intermediaries to promote their products. So the brands reach out to different social media influencers with a massive base of engaged followers and ask them to promote their products by putting posts about the products on the social media accounts of those influencers.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing involves using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, etc., for product endorsement, brand visibility, brand awareness, and building trust among the audience. The difference between traditional and social media marketing is that it is not one-way marketing like traditional marketing.

Social media marketing adds an extra P to the four P’s strategy (product, placement, promotion, and price) that traditional marketing follows. The 5th P is people. Social media marketing allows the audience to engage with the brands through comments in social media posts.

A great social media marketing post must have great content. Content is of grave concern for social media marketing because it creates the primary interest in the audience to engage with the brand.

Therefore, brands use memes, short videos, product reviews, offers, and sales announcements as content on their social media posts. Marketing any brand on facebook.com/katana is very effective right now.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencers marketing is a type of niche marketing strategy that requires the involvement of social media for product placement and endorsement. There are influencers in every field of Business, and they raise brand awareness, credibility and build trust about the brand among the target audience with influential actions.

Influencer marketing breaks the tradition of movie stars posing with certain products and making a close to reality representation of products they are endorsing. However, the influencers are not celebrities; they are prominently Instagram models, Tik Tok sensations, or YouTube creators.

The fact that they are not celebrities makes them very reliable and trustworthy to the target audience.          

Social Media Marketing Vs. Influencer Marketing!

1. Social media marketing serves as an extension of a brand’s appearance. Influencer marketing, on the other hand, works to create a chain of that brand’s awareness.
2. In social media marketing, the consumers decide whether to purchase a specific product or not. But, in influencer marketing, customers rely on the recommendation of the influencers. They decide whether to buy a product or not.
3. Social media marketing requires the brands to have a social media account and post specific product-oriented content. But influencer marketing does not require the brand’s social media account. Instead, the brand asks an influencer to post on their favorite from their social media accounts to promote the brand.
4. Since the influencers have a very active and engaged base of audiences, it takes very minimum time for the posts to reach the targeted audience. But the social media posts may not reach the audience that early.
5. For a company to be successful in social media marketing,, they need to build a huge base of followers who regularly follow and interact with their posts. But, in doing influencer marketing, the company does not need that many followers on their accounts. They can hire a social media influencer to promote the products for them.
6. Social media marketing offers both B2B and B2C marketing options, but influencer-based marketing can only do B2C marketing.

Pros & Cons of Influencer Marketing!

Here are some of the advantages as well as the disadvantages of influencer marketing.

Pros

• Influencer marketing helps a brand reach a particular group of relevant audiences interested in your product and may engage in a long-term brand-audience relationship with the brand.
• An influencer can attract many buyers if you look at the demographics, content, and audience interest.
• Influencer marketing helps the brands create trust and credibility for the buyers. The buyers trust the influencers; that is why they purchase the products the influencers advertise. If the products meet their needs, they tend to trust the brand as well.

Cons

• If a brand chooses the wrong influencer, then the brand may decrease sales; even their brand value and credibility may downgrade.
• The risk involved is more significant. And the result of the marketing is immeasurable.

Pros & Cons of Social Media Marketing!

Here are some of the pros and cons of social media marketing.

Pros

• Since it is a free marketing option, it is a very cost-effective marketing strategy.
• Social media marketing is a great way to increase brand recognition. Your constant activity on social media to promote your brand will make it more recognizable to people.
• It has the potential to open your business up to a large group of audiences.

 Cons

• Social media marketing is a very time-consuming marketing idea.
• Your brand may get negative publicity on social media if the marketing strategy is not good enough.
• Social media marketing dramatically relies on ads.

Conclusion

Both social media marketing and influencer marketing are effective in their fields to reach potential customers. In comparison, social media marketing through the brand’s own social media profile targets the general audience, the influencer marketing targets more niche audiences.

The choice of each of these marketing strategies depends on the types of business trying to implement them. As per my opinion, it is mandatory to utilize social media marketing while influencer marketing is optional.