There has been plenty of talking about how brands should leverage the new hype of digital marketing and social media marketing when the digital wave took everyone by storm a decade or so ago. It was a new age and plenty of people in the marketing business were learning the ropes and trying to figure out the best way to put their brand out there where most people are.

10 years down the road and brand managers with their digital/creative and media agencies are still trying to get that formula or a set template to ensure digital success of each of their campaigns that they wish to roll out. However, the digital universe keeps on evolving and it evolves at a very fast pace compared to traditional media components.

The time of experimentation with digital marketing components is probably over, and now its high time for brand managers and their agencies to realize that each campaign will have its own needs from each digital marketing component and ultimately one channel would be preferred more over the other.

You cannot run just a social media campaign and forget about other marketing channels that digital has to offer. The difference needs to be recognized, and the difference is the social media is just one of the available channels of digital marketing.

Engaging on social media does not mean you are running a successful digital media campaign, as there are many components that need to click together to make it into a 360 digital marketing campaign.

The simplest definition of digital marketing is to build brand awareness or the product that is available online using various digital channels. To recognize those major components of digital marketing, we need to understand internet marketing and its components. First of all, internet marketing makes sure your Website gets the most page views and you show people the desired information you need to show on your website. If you are investing on search marketing understand SEO, Pay Per Click, online banner advertising, email marketing and social media marketing can all be used to route traffic to your website.

You can hire content writes for a great content writing on your website to aid the SEO you perform for your website and so and so forth for other digital marketing components.

The success of social media marketing and the buzz it has generated over the last decade has forced brands to make their mark in this important space right now. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat are the major players who have the highest audiences that serve as eyeballs for brands and their products and their communication to these audiences.

The exchange of information can be done through these channels, and if social media marketing is integrated to its potential in a digital marketing campaign, it can work like an important cog in the campaign’s wheel.

SEO can work like a charm with the help of social media. There are more and more signs that social signals are used by Google for ranking purposes. The communication you have set for your campaign can be of the most effective use on social media than any other channels. You can interact with your customer base with that communication and keep it constant throughout every channel to give it a sense of familiarity.

Digital marketing on its own, tries to go beyond the internet and reach people in the offline world using digital channels while social media is confined to the boundaries of internet, but the success of both is interlinked and both of them cannot be ignored.