Article

Sumit Gharal
Sumit Gharal 11 December 2018

SEO Or SMM Which Is The Best For Your Business In 2019?

Digital marketers and analysts are often asked this question as in which ones better for their business and why. This blog will help you determine which one these services will help them target relevant audience and generate great revenue at the same time.

As a digital marketer, I personally come across many leads. Most of them are basically small businesses or startups. If we sum up all the questions we were asked by them(the business owners) then there is just one prominent question that always pops in our discussions which is: SEO or SMM which will be the best form my business, Especially for the upcoming year, 2019.

Basically, I myself am quietly biased towards SEO. But the main answer lies with the business owner himself. Would he/she like a million followers on a social media platform or would he/she prefer their website ranked number 1 on search engine search page? Search Engine Optimization(SEO) and Social Media Marketing(SMM) are the two major pillars of Digital Marketing. SEO has evolved a lot with time and so has SMM. Each has also got its own fan following.

It is basically said that the generation ‘Z’ or the ‘millennials'(Born in between the 1990s to 2000)  prefer social media marketing very much while the older and the more experienced generation tends to like SEO. Let’s take a look at whether it is SEO or SMM which would help your business in 2019 on the basis of the following three important parameters.

1. Time

Time is a deciding factor especially if you are an entrepreneur. One of the main reason a business owner decides to either opt for either SEO or SMM rather than going for all the Digital Marketing solutions is time. Services which start working ASAP are the ones which are most accepted by business owners. Weather to go with SEO and SMM is a decision which is based on which campaign kicks off first?

SEO campaign is depended on various factors such as the content of the website, keywords, website age, and much more. SEO is a productive yet a time-consuming process. The date of obtaining the result cannot be specified as such. SEO campaigns require continuous monitoring too as keyword rankings and other factors keep on changing in time. Hence it takes time for SEO to show results and the campaign also needs to be monitored continuously. 

SMM a very fast result delivering process. You can launch your social media campaign and can analyze a detailed report which can be obtained on demand. Social media also helps in targeting the right audience at the right place at the right time so it is more supposed to get you quick results than SEO.

2. The Reach

Reach is the number of people that are exposed to you advertisements via a campaign. Social media has a huge following which is numbering in billions. So is it end of the road here for SMM in terms of reach? No, absolutely not. People tend to search whatever they want on search engine rather than logging on to social media sites. Even to this date, a majority of people use services of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to get answers to their problems.

So basically reach is depended on what people actually need or what they want.

Needs: A customer needs the services of a plumber or perhaps an electrician. These are the needs. In this case, a customer will enter their needs onto a search engine and the first business that pop-ups might just be the one who ends up with a job in their hands. Ranking higher than your competitor is only possible through SEO. SO, Here SEO gets the better reach.

Wants: Wants are all about what a customer wishes to have. Like a customer wants a mobile cover with quirky quotes or perhaps a t-shirt with customized print on it. These are the wants a person might want it but there is no urgency to have it. A business can promote such products in a better way online through SMM. So, Social media platforms get the upper hand here in the promotion part.

So if you want people to make use of your services SEO is the best and if you want them to see your services than there is no better option than SMM as social media posts have a higher chance of getting noticed because of the options they have and the traffic these sites have.

3. Targeted Audience

Marketing and especially Digital Marketing is all about targeting the right audiences. If your digital marketing techniques are not able to deliver the right message to the right audience then your efforts are a waste. 

Social Media allows targeting in a well-defined manner. Targeting the audience on basis of age, region and much more such options which help in filtering results and finding the one customer out of a cluster of leads. The data is available in real time here allowing the business owners to make data-driven decisions, helping them accomplish wonders in the future.

Through SEO techniques one cannot actually determine the target audiences on basis of their interests because of the lack of data available on this. The data available may or may not be in real time making it difficult to take data-oriented actions. Here the majority percentage of businesses are depended on using the right keywords to attract the right audience to their business websites.

The Final Conclusion :

It is very hard to tell which services are the best for one business. Each has benefits of its own in some way. But it is the combination of SEO and SMM both which will help drive businesses to new heights and get recognized on the digital marketing front. If you trust in SMM to increase brand awareness it is also important to utilize SEO to promote on the side as well for more people to be able to find your business. 

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