• ICYMI: In celebration of 10 years of their loyalty program, IKEA released a candle that smells like their iconic meatballs 
• Musician Frank Ocean launched his own luxury brand called Homer (and it has a cool, digital flipbook catalog)
• Levi Strauss & Co. is going to acquire Beyond Yoga, a yoga apparel brand
• Ad Age is giving us the multi-brand playbook to how Rihanna recently reached billionaire status

“Digital Marketing” is usually used as an umbrella term for anything involving a website, phone, or computer. Social media gets lumped into the digital world often since it lives on all three of those. BUT there is a difference when it comes to digital marketing and marketing on social media in your strategy. EconoTimes defines how and which one to use for your brand.

Social Media Marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience.

Digital Marketing, as we said, encompasses all internet and online technologies as well as digital media.

But let’s get down to the big differences that SMM offers:

• It’s great for drilling down into your target audience directly. Social media platforms offer customer information like interests, education, and age.
• On top of paid advertising, you get an extra layer of an organic brand experience for users. Audiences will follow or find you based on your content here, making it different from other content you’re putting out online.
• You are always in control of how much money you will spend and worry less about bidding.

Which one should you care about? That depends on what you want to use a paid advertising strategy for. In a perfect world, you could distribute your budget across all channels and your brand lived happily ever after. In reality, you’re gonna have to think about if you should go the social media route or other digital marketing routes. Fortunately, you have a lot of platforms to choose from.

Regardless, social media profiles should always be active for the sake of brand awareness and organic traffic. Read the full EconoTimes article for examples and tips.

Knowing your website like the back of your hand is hard to do. There are a lot of ways to keep a pulse on it, but one of the easiest ways to track its performance is with UpTrends. This tool lets you quickly check your site performance and provide the following essential metrics:

• Load time
• Page size
• Requests made to load the page
• Improvement recommendations
• Request waterfall and breakdown

You can test from desktop and mobile from servers worldwide. This is especially great for those with international audience reach.

Try it out for free to see for yourself! You can also check out their premium options for automation options.

We try to be know-it-alls for marketers and do-it-alls.

But there’s gotta be something you can share with us in this big, wide world of marketing that we don’t know.

If you own a piece of content that you think The Daily Carnage readers would enjoy, let’s hear it. We have plenty of ways to give you the spotlight, so here’s your time to shine.

Pooches+Porsches

Dogs+Dodges

Fidos+Ferraris

We could do this all day.

MINI knows exactly what they’re doing here. You put a cute animal on the internet, it’s gonna get watched. Their ad is in collaboration with the Dog Trust, a UK humane society organization. This dog and pony (err, MINI?) show displays all the features that make MINI’s dog friendly while staying cute and entertaining. What can we say, we’re suckers for pups.