Michael Calia - 11/05/2024
Paid and organic social media content should not operate in separate silos. When properly integrated, they create the foundation for a successful social media marketing strategy, helping expand your business’ reach across multiple platforms and bolstering a strong brand image while driving meaningful conversions to fuel sustained growth.
Social media marketing remains one of the most effective tactics for marketers of all sizes. There are an estimated 5.17 billion social media users across the globe, with the typical user spending about 2 hours and 23 minutes a day browsing social media platforms, making it quite the opportunity for businesses looking to reach new potential customers. Achieving the maximum benefit of such a medium lies in understanding the not only unique values of organic and paid content, but how to successfully combine the two to produce a true hybrid strategy.
Among marketers who said they were “extremely confident” in measuring the ROI of social media, 65% have completely integrated their paid and organic efforts. This means that not only do they understand how to combine these strategies to effectively reach their customers, but they can also specifically trace the value in doing so. So, if you’re trying to build an productive social media marketing strategy, you’ll need to understand how to properly blend your organic and paid content into a hybrid approach.
Value of Organic Content
As most businesses will understand, you can’t build a strong social media marketing strategy with exclusively organic content. Paid promotion is crucial for increasing brand awareness in an immensely crowded medium, and its ability to drive conversions and yield increased sales is unmatched by organic.
While paid promotion is more effective for driving key results such as landing page clicks, video views or conversions, organic serves the valuable purpose of giving potential customers a chance to quickly learn more about your brand’s values. In today’s age of having endless information about companies at our fingertips, many conscious consumers prefer doing business with brands that share similar values to their own. In fact, a recent Ryder survey found that 11% of online shoppers view this as the most important factor when deciding who they purchase from.
A proper hybrid strategy utilizes the benefits of paid and organic social media content.
But not every page visitor comes from organic search. Depending on your targeting strategy, the first they learn of your brand may be from a paid social media ad. When this is the case, users may look to the page pushing this specific ad to learn more. So, say your paid approach succeeds in triggering some sort of interest in a potential customer. If that person were to come to your page and see more relevant content, or posts highlighting causes and initiatives they believe in, it can create a new customer. However, if they see a dead page or one posting things that are completely irrelevant, it can turn them away for good.
Testing Content Forms
Considering that the types of content shared organically would likely overlap with what you’re promoting via paid sponsorship, and vice versa, you should use this as an opportunity to test your messaging. The strategy is similar to any other form of A/B testing: analyze how each piece of content performs and focus on the ones that get the best results.
When deciding which types of content to put money behind, a sound approach involves picking out the posts that have had the best organic performance. We’ve detailed this process in a previous blog, and the logic holds true when analyze what organic content to boost with paid promotion. If your page following received a piece of content well, it’s likely to achieve the same results when pushed to a wider audience with similar interests and activity. This can help create a quality first impression for people who may be hearing about your business for the first time by seeing a social media ad. If you have a relatively limited budget for paid social media, allocating it toward the strongest content is the most cost-effective way to optimize your marketing strategy.
Ideally, your paid strategy will already involve testing multiple forms of messaging, varying the copy and imagery to determine how to best reach your target audience. As ads have had time to separate themselves in terms of performance, it should become easier to identify the strongest variations. These should be implemented into the organic strategy if possible. Your page following can often be viewed as users who already have a demonstrated interest in your business, so content that performs well for a paid target audience should resonate well when shared organically. Depending on the metrics you’re prioritizing, the organic form of this content can also spur meaningful interactions and conversations with your followers, further strengthening the relationship.
Build Audiences Based on Activity
In certain cases, organic performance data can be used to create target audiences for paid campaigns. Meta’s advertising suite allows marketers to make custom audiences based on interactions with a Facebook or Instagram page. These audiences will include users who have interacted with any of the page content in a specified timeframe, meaning anyone who likes, comments on, or shares a post will be targeted via this strategy. This data can then be used to create lookalike audiences, potentially widening your promotion’s reach to people whose interests and activities resemble those who regularly engage with your page content.
While this strategy can be a valuable blend of organic and paid performance, it should be properly planned to achieve optimal results. For example, if your business includes a wide range of products and services across multiple industries, your regular organic content will likely vary. If this is the case, creating a custom audience from page activity will draw from all interactions, creating a pool that may not be as specified as you’d like. However, if you’re planning a paid campaign with a wider reach, or if your page followers don’t include many different types of audiences, this strategy can be a perfect way to raise brand awareness among those who may be interested in your business. Consider this approach with various objectives to determine if it’s better at driving engagement, website traffic, video views or any other key performance indicators (KPIs).
Audience Insights Drive Decisions
Most platforms provide demographic information to help you asses who specifically is following your page. This can be immensely valuable, as it often helps to understand how old your followers are, where they live, what industries they work in, and so on. However, this information can be limited when looking at who specifically is interacting with your content.
When analyzing paid content performance, it’s important to look at the demographic details of who your ads are reaching and who is interacting. But the available information can vary by platform.
Meta’s Ads Manager allows you to analyze age and gender distribution of those who interacted with specific ads.
When pushing ads on Facebook and Instagram, age and gender performance data can be useful if you’re trying to cater more to those groups. As an example, if your current page following skews older, but your business is making a push to reach a younger audience, a thorough paid strategy can help you target people in those age groups. By understanding the types of ads that have succeeded in reaching that audience, your organic content can reflect those characteristics to be more favorable when younger users visit your page.
LinkedIn ads can be analyzed by identifying the industries, job function, and job titles that interacted with content the most.
LinkedIn offers a look into the professional backgrounds of those interacting with your ads. If you notice that professionals within certain industries have been consistently converting through your ads, you can cater your organic content to better reflect the curiosities and concerns of people working in those fields. This can be especially useful for spurring conversations among professional networks, as you can focus on topics that people in these spheres would be willing to discuss with other like-minded professionals. As a result, you’d build a stronger network by widening your page’s reach among a valuable audience segment.
Paid and organic social media content should not operate in separate silos. When properly integrated, they create the foundation for a successful social media marketing strategy, helping expand your business’ reach across multiple platforms and bolstering a strong brand image while driving meaningful conversions to fuel sustained growth. If you’d like to discuss how to optimize your social media marketing efforts, you can contact us here.