Social Media marketing is a living, breathing thing that is constantly evolving. Do you remember when socials for business were about company updates, engagement and building a brand presence online? Now when we ask ourselves how deep the rabbit hole goes we can see that social media marketing can cover the full scope of the consumer journey.
It can include customer acquisition, remarketing, retention, and service. Depending on your business model, you could do most of, if not all of your digital marketing on social media. Crazy, right?
Why marrying Paid Social & Organic Social will give you a winning social media strategy
When it comes to Organic Social vs Paid Social, we like to see it as a beautiful marriage rather than a fight against which one should be prioritised and which one can be left on the sidelines. When done correctly, both methods of social media marketing have their part to play in a wider digital marketing strategy that gets those customers rushing to your website to check out your products and services.
We’ll explore just how much one supports the other and how you should be utilising both methods as part of your marketing efforts. But first, what is the difference between the two?
Organic social media
Organic social is any social media activity without a paid promotion. It is the use of free social media tools to build and engage with an online following or posting content directly to social media platforms. This can include images, videos and written content which you can use to promote your business, strengthen your brand image and build trust and loyalty with your target audience.
Laying organic foundations
While it can be hard building a social media business or personal account from scratch in an authentic way, business owners have to start seeing it as networking and building an online community. While anyone can buy followers and engagement and seem bigger and more important than they are, they can quickly be found out for the fraud they are in this day and age. It takes time to build the foundations of a real online community.
With regular idea generation, forward-planning and creativity, you could start building more engagement over time and build up a nice organic following without the need to spend money.
Social post scheduling
The key here is to schedule your regular weekly posts for the weeks or preferably months ahead. There are a range of scheduling tools to choose from depending on your requirements and platforms such as Facebook let you schedule posts
Scheduling your social media posts will free up your time for more creative, reactive marketing. It lets you explore more avenues on different social media platforms that you may not have had time for previously.
Creative organic content
Get creative with your organic posts! Think reactive memes that relate world events and celebrity news back to your niche in a funny way, questions and polls on Facebook and Instagram stories to encourage more engagement from your audience, fun video content, etc.
Posting various types of content across social media platforms will help you identify what type of posts do best so you can post more of what works for your business and gain a deeper understanding of what type of content works within your niche. This will result in even better engagement and brand loyalty over time and your follower count will start to reflect your growing online community.
Knowing people are following you because they love what you post and want to hear more from you is a great feeling. It also means if you choose to implement a paid strategy in future, you’ll get even better results because you’ve built a strong, organic foundation and already have strong data on who your target customers are and the type of content they love to see.
Trends & insights
As mentioned above, a great way to stand out across social media platforms organically is to stay on top of trends and to not shy away from the latest updates that promote different variations of content eg. short-form videos.
For example, since Instagram’s push for short-form video content and the release of Reels, people are seeing a lot more reach when they post Reels than when they post regular posts. However, it must be noted that Instagram’s algorithm still prioritises Reels that check certain boxes so you have to make sure your content is engaging and resonates with your followers to get more engagement and build your following.
It’s important to keep checking what’s trending and what’s new across Google trends and social media platforms consistently so you can stay ahead of the game and keep your brand fresh and relevant in your customers’ minds. You should also be checking insights into how your social media accounts are doing periodically
Paid social media
Paid Social is an unstoppable machine that keeps expanding into new realms. While social media platforms are constantly enticing businesses to boost posts and create ads willy-nilly, it’s really important to be smart about your advertising budget and do your research before creating ads. Putting a digital advertising strategy in place with budgets and a reasonable ROAS in mind is crucial before you start spending on ads.
If you can get expert advice or can partner with digital advertising experts, you’re cruising! However, if you’re just starting out or you’d like to try to figure some of it out for yourself, here’s a list for you to check off before you get started:
Creative content
Stand out from your competition by creating eye-catching creatives that entice your audience to click on your ad. If you’re just starting out with content creation, try Canva. It offers tutorials and templates for content creators to help them make social media posts, ads, posters, brochures and so much more.
Stand out copy
Although the creatives have to catch your audience’s eye, you need scroll-stopping advertising copy to make people click on your ad and land on your website. Take a look at the types of ads your competitors are posting across social media platforms for inspiration.
Building ad campaigns
When you build out your ad campaigns correctly you’re able to monitor, test and optimise each campaign and individual advertisement to keep it fresh, make sure it’s going out to the right pools of people and focus your ad budget on the ads that are performing the best.
All about the data
With each new ad you create, you’ll be collecting valuable data which you can then evaluate and see which of your ads are generating the best results. This is crucial for testing out different image assets and different styles of copy to get even better results over time, getting you more return on your investment.
Retargeting
Around 97% of shoppers leave before making a purchase that’s why retargeting those shoppers that have shown an initial interest in your brand or product is crucial in lifting ad engagement rates up to 400% and helping close sales.
How organic social will elevate your paid social strategy
When you implement a paid social strategy to an existing organic social strategy, you’ll find you will get better results overall. You can repurpose content (which means less work for you!) and you’ll get better social proof.
Organic will help you hone in on your perfect customer persona and pools of audiences. Your network will engage with posts more and more as it grows organically and posts will be pulled into their feeds in a more natural way. Your posts will be pushed further up the algorithm and exposed to even bigger audiences, giving you even more to work with within your paid social strategy.
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