Digital marketing vs Influencer marketing: which one to choose

Hi, I am Praneeth,

If you are confused about which one to go after in between,

Digital marketing vs Influencer marketing.

This is the perfect place for you.

In this blog, you will learn all about digital marketing vs influencer marketing, types, pros, and cons of both in detail.

The blog is filled with facts and examples so continue reading.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Here is a 30000-foot view of the blog.

Definition:

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a practice of promoting a product on online platforms using electronic devices like phone and computer such as,

• Google, email.
• Social media channels.
• Online stores, community, and forums.

There are many types of digital marketing, they include.

1. Search engine optimization.
2. Search engine marketing.
3. Content marketing.
4. Social media marketing.
5. Affiliate marketing.
6. Email marketing.

You will learn more about these along with their pros and cons in this blog,

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is a strategy of using influencers to promote brand products and services.

Today influencer marketing is more on finding influencers on online platforms like Instagram with a decent following and a community.

Unlike celebrities and tv reality show stars in the past.

This one is a part of Social Media Marketing in Digital Marketing Strategy.

Influencers are divided into 3 categories based on their followers such as,

1. Micro-influencers- following fewer than 10000 people- has a good dedicated audience and engagement.
2. Middle influencers- following base of between 10000 to 250000 people-they have less dedicated audience and engagement as compared to micro.
3. Macro influencers- following more than 250000 people-they obviously have more reach with less dedicated audience and engagement as compared to micro and middle.

Here, As the number of followers grows, the engagement and the dedicated audience gets smaller and smaller.

Let’s now find out the pros and cons of both digital marketing vs influencer marketing.

Pros and cons of both.

In this part, you will learn what are the pros and cons of both digital marketing overall and influencer marketing.

Types of digital marketing with their pros and cons.

Here is a list of types of digital marketing along with their pros and cons.

Type and meaning	Pros	Cons
1. SEO – It is search engine marketing, which is driving traffic to websites and eCommerce stores through search engines like google and bing.	– It is passive and free. – It is targeted. – It has better conversion rates. – It increases the visibility & growth of the business.	– It is time-consuming. – It is competitive. – It is constantly changing due to google’s algorithms. – ROI is slow.
2. SEM/PPC – Search Engine Marketing/Pay Per Click [PPC] is driving traffic through search engines using paid advertisements to your website on search engines, when a visitor clicks on your ad[website] in search engines, you have to pay search engines like google & bing money for each click [PPC].	– It gives instant traffic. – It is flexible and you get targeted traffic. – It increases the visibility of the brand faster. – You can target specific locations and audiences.	– Not long-lasting. – Expensive.           – It is competitive.
3. Content marketing – It is about creating content like blogs, videos, and podcasts consistently and sharing them online, and indirectly promoting brands & products.	– It builds credibility and authority of the brand with the audience. – It increases leads and sales by attracting targeted traffic by SEO. – The audience is loyal. – It is easy to measure growth.	– It is a time-consuming task. – It is difficult and expensive if you have a small team like outsourcing the work. – ROI is slow.
4. Social media marketing – It is the practice of using social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to connect with your audience, build a brand, increase more sales, and leads to your business or run ad campaigns on these platforms and generate sales [PPC].	– A big audience to capture. – If the brand is genuine, the audience becomes loyal. – It is cheap in terms of running ads on social media and ROI of it, it works on PPC. – It is a great way to know about your customers and help them or get feedback on your product fast.	– You have less control over things like negative reviews and comments on your brand. – It is a time-consuming task to maintain. – There is a chance of negative publicity of your brand due to fake news and rumors.
5. Affiliate marketing – It is a process of marketing other people’s/brands products and services and earning a commission if your audience purchases that product from your affiliate link.	– It is a billion-dollar business with less cost to enter. – It gives more sales for brands and passive income for marketers. – There is no limit to earning for marketers.	– You don’t control the programs if you are a marketer. – It is pretty competitive. – You being a marketer can’t guarantee revenue as a job gives. – You don’t own the customer base you are generating to. – Bad product selling will affect your reputation so be careful in promoting products.
6. Email marketing – It is a process of sending emails to your customers and audience to convert them into your customers if they have not yet or drive some action from them.	– It helps better relationships with your audience. – It is very customizable and very targeted. – Higher conversion rates at less cost. – Growth is easy to measure due to tools. – It is both easily scalable and shareable. – You have a reliable audience to market your product.	– It needs a lot of consistency in regular updates to your email subscribers. – A Lot of things depend on first impressions for users. – If you are either overly spamming the subscriber with lots of emails & pushing him all the time to buy things or adding no value, he will instantly unsubscribe you.

There are other types of digital marketing like,

• Radio advertising.
• TV advertising.
• Billboards advertising.
• Phone cold call advertising.
• Banner advertising.

All these traditional advertising types are mostly outdated like radio, newspapers, and cold call ones.

They are not effective at all as compared to real digital marketing types, they simply have more cons than pros and usually not recommended for today’s marketing strategy for brands [TV & billboard ads are quite good but expensive].

Now, that you have understood the pros and cons of types of digital marketing, let’s understand what are some general benefits of using digital marketing over other means of marketing,

General digital marketing pros:

1. It is a great option if you have a limited budget.

You have a company or a brand and you are tight on budget but you have to do the marketing of your product.

Digital marketing is the best solution in this situation.

As you know that there are different types of marketing that comes under digital marketing like,

• Social media.
• Search engine.
• Affiliate.

Unlike traditional marketing where you need to invest a lot of money in marketing your product like

• Advertising on tv and radio.
• Advertising on billboards and banners.
• Advertising in newspapers and magazines.

Digital marketing is very affordance as compared to these other types of marketing you have,

You can run ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Google [PPC] in a couple of hundred dollars and make a profit of thousands of dollars in sales because the ads are very targeted as compared to tv and radio ads.

Or you can create content [content marketing] and drive targeted traffic through search engines.

You can take advantage of affiliate marketing or email marketing along with content marketing which does not require a big investment.

2. You can build better relations with the audience.

Mainly social media marketing, content marketing, and email marketing are great options to create and build strong relationships with the audience and do the marketing of the product.

Mainly on social media platforms, you are always interacting with your audience, in terms of comments and chats.

Look, emails marketing, content marketing are kind of mediums which allows you to go with a very personalized approach to the audience which is not possible with other means of marketing like tv.

3. Digital marketing is very targeted because it hits the right audience.

Look, depending on the brand you have, the product you sell, and the audience type.

You can choose whichever medium of digital marketing you want.

For example, if you have a product on SEO tools like Ahrefs.

You can start an affiliate marketing program and increase your product and service sales through affiliate marketers.

If you have any online software, you can get in touch with a content marketer and do the marketing there or you can buy ads on google [SEM] and generate more sales.

Ultimately, you will be generating more sales through digital marketing,

Look, digital marketing gives more conversions than traditional marketing like newspaper and tv ads because they are targeted to the right audience.

Another benefit of digital marketing is the product that people purchase is only a few clicks away unlike traditional marketing where people have to travel to the shop and buy things.

4. You can scale the business & your customer base internationally.

It is a digital man.

It is online.

You are marketing your product on,

• Blogs.
• Social media channels.
• Search engines.

These things are not limited to a particular location and people.

Due to the different features you have,

You can target audiences worldwide and make customers internationally.

Using SEM[PPC] you can easily target a specific group of people at a particular location without spending a large amount of money.

Like,

You want to do the marketing of your product in America or Germany.

You can buy Google ads and run a campaign at that particular location in specific keywords and specific time.

So, people of only that location can visit your place and you can do marketing easily.

This is the power of SEM and the same goes for SEO but it takes time to see results where you don’t have to pay money for that traffic.

The same goes for,

• Social media marketing.
• Email marketing.
• Affiliate marketing.

In the case of affiliate marketing, you have a product like software that is mostly sold in India and you want it to be sold in America as well.

Then you can contact an affiliate marketer who can help you get more sales of your product in different countries which is not possible with tv ads and newspaper ads like traditional marketing.

5. You can mostly track the growth.

If you are going with Google-like SEO and content marketing, you will have tools at your fingertips such as,

• Google analytics.
• Google search console.
• Google ad analytics.

The same goes with running ads on Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram,

You will have analytics to access your growth and your performance.

You can know the following things,

• Which page users are liking on your website most.
• Which page is having more user interaction and which has less?
• What is the public opinion of your brand?
• How are people interacting with your product?
• Public feedback on the product.

You can also measure how many people took the action of your content and bought the product you had to offer.

You know it is pretty amazing.

You don’t have this advantage with traditional marketing types like,

• Newspaper ads.
• Radio ads.
• Tv ads.
• Magazine ads.
• Billboards ads.

General digital marketing cons:

1. It is a lot of competition.

It is a no brainer thing.

Of course, the competition will be obviously high.

More people/brands are fighting for the attention of people than anything.

It is not that people are not succeeding but if you are not utilizing the right strategies with the right mindset,

You might fail in digital marketing.

You see,

• There are more than 500 million blogs and 1.7 billion websites on the internet.
• There are hundreds of hours of video content is published on youtube every second.

You know it is a lot of competition, every niche is saturated.

You know there is a lot of competition out there fighting for attention and impression of people.

2. It needs a lot of effort.

It might seem not that big thing but,

Digital marketing is not a piece of cake to run.

Depending on the type of marketing you run in this digital marketing, you obviously know that it is a lot of effort.

• Running a blog.
• Running and maintaining a social media profile, filtering bad comments or responding to the comments.
• Running ad campaigns and analyzing analytics.
• Maintaining email lists.
• Maintaining the website and looking after affiliate marketing.

You know it is a lot of work on your head to handle in digital marketing and believe it or not.

Digital marketing is not easy because I am a content marketer and from my experience, I can assure you, it is not a piece of cake.

3. Things are not always in your control.

Because you are working on digital platforms like,

• Search engines.
• Social media platforms.
• E-commerce stores.

There are people of all types,

You can’t satisfy all people, meet their needs and expectations all the time.

A lot of things may go wrong in your digital marketing campaign like,

• Bad comments, rumors, and negative publicity of your brand on social media channels.
• Spamming and scammers of your brand on social platforms and on your blog.
• Trolls and memes of your brand by haters are quite common on social media platforms.
• Giving bad reviews of your product or brand on social media channels.
• Your digital marketing campaign and strategies can get easily copied by others which you cannot control.

All these things will convey a bad message about your brand to the audience you want to target, so be very careful with that,

Create a good first impression of your brand that people like, get connected, and admire you and your brand.

4. Security and privacy issues.

Be extremely careful while handling the security and privacy data of your audience.

Mainly if you are on types like

• Email marketing.
• Social media marketing.
• Search engine optimization.

You need to be very careful with the privacy and data security of your users who visit your place and when you are marketing the products to them.

You might be banned by the platforms as a cybercrime like fraud calls and bad deals offer if you do not handle the data and security of your users properly and handle the reputation of the brand.

Influencer marketing pros:

1. It saves a lot of your time and effort.

This is obvious,

You don’t have to do any other thing in terms of marketing your product.

You don’t have to worry about content marketing or any other thing.

Your influencer takes care of the things itself and saves you a hell of a lot of time.

The influencers are going to create content [posts] that really aligns and resonates with their audience who follow them because the influencers have a good understanding and experience of their followers.

2. It builds the trust and credibility of your brand.

Look,

When a celebrity who is a well-known guy, recommends something who has a good following and engagement of himself, people tend to listen to him and follow his advice.

People blindly trust the influencers and follow their recommendations.

The fact is that,

• 70% of teens trust influencers more than traditional celebrities.
• 49% of consumers depend on influencers’ recommendations.

3. Your brand will have a larger reach.

This thing depends on the influencer you choose to promote your product,

If he is a celebrity or a sports star and you have the budget to hire someone of that caliber.

Your brand will definitely reach higher levels because of the influencer.

These influencers have a following and a community of their specific group of people who are interested in a specific niche.

For example, Virat Kohli [famous Indian cricketer] has Instagram followers of over 81.9 million.

Almost all of these people have an interest in cricket or sports in general.

If your brand is international and related to sports like Puma or  Nike something like sports shoes and dresses.

It is going to get you a lot of traffic & long-lasting customers and audience to your brand because of the influencer.

4. It does not looks like an advertisement.

The fact is that,

• 40% of consumers use adblockers on their devices.
• Influencer marketing can give twice as profitable as paid ads can give.

Although influencer marketing is a sort of paid advertising for a product it actually does not look like an advertisement at all.

The posts and influencer marketing method is not like a typical ad which is like a,

• Pushy.
• Distracting and disturbing,

The posts look genuine and normal one which makes influencer marketing awesome.

5. It is not that expensive as compared to its ROI.

The fact is that,

• For every dollar you spend on influencer marketing, you can earn about 6.50 dollars in return.

Also, many influencers have promoted products without getting paid because the product is good.

There are many benefits you will have with influencer marketing as you spend a few hundred dollars on an Instagram or a youtube influencer.

Influencer marketing cons:

1. Wrong influencer can hurt the brand more than anything.

If you are picking the wrong influencer for your product, it is going to hurt your brand quite a lot.

It is relatively a new form of a marketing strategy but if you are careless with regards to selecting the influencers for your brand it might cost you, your brand.

Here are things which might hurt your brand,

• Choosing an influence with a bad public reputation.
• Choosing an influence without analyzing his audience, followers[ there is a high chance of fakefollowers].
• Posting content that does not resonate with the audience.
• An influencer who doesn’t resonate with your product or niche like a sportsman promoting condoms.
• Writing wrong captions and product descriptions in posts.
• Analyze the engagement of the influencer on his social media platforms such as likes, shares, comments with respect to his followers.

2. You can’t always track the growth.

You generally don’t have any google analytics or ad analytics at fingertips to see how the influencer post created an impact on people and the profit you got.

Measuring growth is quite difficult.

You need to manually examine the status of each advertisement post by an influencer,

• Look at the engagement through likes, shares.
• Look at the comments of the post.
• If the post is a video, obviously look at the views.

Measuring growth is quite difficult in influencer marketing.

Future/is it worth your time and money?

In this part, you are going to learn, what is the future of digital marketing and influencer marketing going to look like, is it safe and worth it starting digital marketing considering its future.

Digital marketing.

Before talking anything about digital marketing’s future, let the facts speak for itself.

• 93% of online interactions start on search engines.
• 3.2 billion people use social media every day.
• People spend an average of 142 minutes on social media every day.

Source: Lauro media.

You know, digital marketing is going to stay now.

In fact, more people are moving online than leaving their traditional habits.

Mainly due to covid pandemic and movie theatres being closed, more people have adopted online movie streaming services like

• Amazon prime.
• Netflix.
• Hotstar.

More people are using social media to stay connected and follow social distancing.

• According to TechCrunch, More people are using online stores for shopping due to covid.

Ultimately, the digital marketing future is obviously bright. no need to worry about that it is definitely good to start digital marketing of your product.

Influencer marketing.

Before talking anything about influencer marketing’s future, let the facts speak for itself.

• 67% of marketing and communications professionals engage with influencers for content promotion.
• There is a growing trend of influence marketing in Google trends.
• Nearly, 40% of Twitter users have said that they have made a purchase of something due to tweets of an influencer.
• 70% of teenage youtube subscribers say that they relate to youtube creators more than traditional celebrities.
• 6 out of 10 youtube subscribers would follow advice on what to buy from their favorite creator over their favorite tv or movie personality.
• 91% of millennials trust online reviews as much ca friends and family.
• 84% of companies have a plan of working with a social media star next year.
• 89% of people surveyed said that ROI from influencer marketing is better than other marketing channels.
• 17% of marketers expected to spend half of their budget on influencer marketing.

Source: Influcermarketinghub.

It seems Bombarded with facts,

Yeah,

Influencer marketing future is really good actually,

Facts speak the truth.

But, there is a little diversion from real influencer marketing.

Brands are now moving towards more on influencers on Instagram and Twitter-like social media influencers.

They are moving more on influencers online than traditional movie stars and celebrities.

According to Forbes, Brands are moving towards Influencers online like Instagram and Twitter who are trusted, emotionally connected, share similar grounds with audiences like demographics and interests with the general audience.

Because these influencers help drive more sales than traditional celebrities can do.

Digital marketing vs influencer marketing, which one to choose?

Now the decision totally depends on your business and product type,

You should choose a digital marketing type if you,

• You have a younger brand or product with less visibility.
• You don’t have much experience.
• Your majority of audiences are on social media or search engines.
• You have less budget.
• You have often patient and thinking of the longterm.

You should start influecer marketing if you,

• You have a good budget.
• You want more reach and trust in your brand faster.
• You have found the right influencer relevant to your niche and product.
• You don’t have much time in marketing and creating content.
• You have a big brand and want to expand it even bigger and reach a new audience.

The decision totally depends on you and your choices,

A pro tip would be that you should experiment with all types of things who knows which will work best for you, your brand, and your product.

Ending remarks.

There you go, I have answered everything there is to know about digital marketing vs influencer marketing.

Do let me know which type of marketing you are going to start for your business and product now in the comments section below.

Please consider sharing the blog on social media channels with your family and friends to let them also know which marketing strategy works best today.

You know, sharing is caring.

Consider reading our other blogs,

• Read, 13 reasons to start a blog.
• Read, Pros, and cons of SEO.
• Read, 10 truths about starting a blog.

I will catch you next time, till then.

Keep learning and keep growing.