Online marketing has become an important part of almost every business strategy. Social media marketing and search engine marketing are two main aspects of any successful online marketing campaign. One way or the other, both forms of marketing complement each other. Here is a brief overview of the two vast fields of marketing on the internet.

Search engine marketing

• They provide concise information about the websites related to a particular question or search topic so viewers are attracted to them.
• Advertisers can place pay per click ads on search engine sites to gain well-placed ads that potential customers will hopefully see.
• Marketers can apply search engine optimization to their websites by developing web content. By doing this they can achieve a good ranking and gain more visibility in the search engine pages.

Social media marketing

• Offers the possibility to communicate directly with the consumer
• Targeted ads based on demographic criteria, focused audience
• Stay connected with your consumers

In the usage of a search engine, your consumer expresses the need or the product that she/he most probably wishes to buy. The consumer has expressed his need in the search query and thus, the probability of buying an item displayed in an Ad or in the search query is very high.

In the usage of social media, the consumer doesn’t specially use the social media to look to buy a product. Furthermore, the ads are displayed based on a mechanism of usage and demographics and not relevancy for the consumer need. How can you guess a consumer need in this case? Must probably the requirements in the product displayed will not match an acceptable level for a buy decision. Thus, the tendency to make a purchase decision is much lower.

However, there is scenario when Social Media Marketing is very useful. Say you have invented a completely new thing for a common problem. Since it’s a new invention, people will not "search" for it. If you use social media marketing to promote that product, the people will think "Hey!... here is a nice solution for this. I've never seen that before. I should buy that/check that.". That’s a clear advantage for Social Media Marketing.

To conclude, SEM is better for direct buy decision, however SMM can help you to promote products that are not yet in the mind of the consumer.