Here’s a short answer to the question of whether social media are enough internet marketing strategy to get a business going: no. Social media are effective only when they are coupled with other strategies such as email marketing, blogs, content marketing, and even pay-per-click advertising. A business cannot survive on social media presence alone. After all, are all your customers part of social media?

The best way to define who you are targeting are is to identify your target market? Are you catering to the baby boomers? The millennials? Generation Z? Are you selling to mothers? Fathers? Teenagers? What are the lifestyles of your clients? It is important to answer all of these questions before your internet marketing strategy takes shape. And when we talk about strategy, we mean a combination of many things—websites, blogs, emails, social media, etc.

A business cannot depend on social media alone. Facebook and Instagram cannot be the only advertising and promotional strategies your business will get into. There are a lot of components that makes internet marketing work and social media alone cannot survive. For one, even if you are targeting the millennial generation, who are tech-savvy and seems to be always glued on their smartphones, you aren’t exactly sure how many of them are on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or Snapchat at any given time. That makes it hard to create targeted content that will pop on their screens when they open a particular social media profile.

What you do know is where they hang out and where they go. This is tangible. You can see with your own two eyes that millennials are either in artisan coffee houses or hanging out in a quiet bar at night with friends. So instead of focusing solely on your social media strategy, you can create an event that will be held where your target market is hanging out. This is where you can promote your website and social media profiles to your audience. But before that? You’re basically hoping that luck will be on your side and they won’t pass by your post on social media.

Creating the right content for social media is harder than it looks, too. This is why it’s important to diversify one’s internet marketing strategy so you can be able to reach as many of your target market as you want. This is the only way to advertise your audience to a wider reach without isolating anyone.