Social media marketing has changed significantly in recent years, from being about engagement to cultivating an authentic persona online.
Now it encompasses the whole customer journey: acquiring customers, getting them to come back, keeping them loyal, and helping them out when they need service.
This evolution is happening rapidly on both organic and paid social media platforms. New networks rise to prominence, new technology increases user participation and real-time content, and existing networks enhance their platform and product.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is “the process of creating content that can be shared on social media sites, to achieve your marketing and branding goals.”
It is important to note that social media marketing is not just about posting your updates on Facebook and Twitter.
It also includes other activities like listening to what people say about your brand, engaging in conversations, and even running ads.
Social media marketing requires a strategic approach, and it is essential to understand how each social media platform can be used to achieve your goals.
Read our blog on Social Media Marketing Basics
Types of Social Media Marketing
There are two types of social media marketing strategies: organic and paid.
Organic Social Media Marketing
What are organic social media strategies?Organic social media is when a brand or company contributes content to its social media feeds without using paid advertising. You only need to set up your online account and start posting data for your own audience to create an organic social media campaign.
Any content posted on social media profiles, such as posts, videos, stories, and more, is called organic social media content.
A subset of your followers, individuals who follow any hashtags you include, and anyone who shares your post gets access to this content.
Sadly, organic reach has been declining due to the intense competition between brands and individuals for attention on social media.
Advantages
It's Free
Managing an organic presence on social networks can be affordable AND produce excellent results with the right strategy and focus. You won’t need to put in much effort, but time will need to be invested. Even though communicating with your community takes time, it is possible if you have a group of workers or independent contractors working for you.
Direct Communication With your Customer
A fantastic approach to regularly interacting with your consumers is through social media. You may respond to any queries about your goods or services and publish compliments and complaints by keeping an active social media presence. Because it is a direct answer to the user, this offers a customized experience while still being practical.
Stay Ahead
You’re definitely behind the game if you haven’t begun planning your organic digital marketing campaigns yet. After all, 84% of B2B marketers use social media in some capacity, and 91% of brands are currently active on several social media platforms.
The good news is that you can investigate and learn from a wealth of great social media tales and paid campaigns to assist your company in developing a clever organic social media strategy before getting started.
Organic Social Boosts Validity
Users typically visit a company’s social media page after seeing advertising on social media. You probably lack followers and engagement if you don’t have an organic social media plan to support sponsored efforts.
Suppose you don’t already have an organic approach that strives to produce content often, interact with social media users, and respond to consumer delights or concerns. In that case, the people you’re targeting with paid advertising may doubt the legitimacy of your brand.
Drive Sales
Consumers who follow a company on social networking sites are more likely to be loyal to that company (53%). Users may build a connection with your brand by providing information about its goal, vision, and values. The development of online relationships is directly related to company sales.
Disadvantages
Organic SMM limits your audience's reach
Only your current audience sees organic social media updates, so you must rely on them to keep buying from you and spreading the word about your content. This restricts your visibility and lessens your opportunity to meet new potential clients.
It isn't targeted
The targeting of organic posts differs from that of sponsored posts. Rather than being able to retarget existing customers based on their previous queries or intentions, you must adopt a universal strategy in the hopes that many, if not most, of your followers, will find your postings interesting.
Time Consuming
Social media networks may be enjoyable and engaging for personal usage, but when it comes to utilizing them for business, there’s more to it than just sharing clever jokes. Results won’t appear right away, so use it as a tool to reach out to consumers and solicit feedback.
If you don’t have a committed team to manage your social media activities, publishing content consistently for your social media channels may be time-consuming and a significant time drain.
Less Flexibility
Your organic social media efforts have a limited initial reach since it depends on how far your followers spread it. As a result, you can only anticipate your organic content being seen by your initial audience and those they share it with.
Unlike commercial social media, where you may target and disseminate your content to particular user kinds or demographics, free social media does not allow this.
Paid Social Media Marketing
More people are likely to view it when you pay to promote content on social media. This may be accomplished by having advertising that can be considered as text, a photo, a video, or a carousel shown on a social media network.
You might also pay for sponsored messages uniquely suited to a person’s profile or demographics. The price of sponsored social media advertising varies depending on your campaign type.
Advantages of Organic Social Media Strategy
Expand Brand Awareness
Advertising on social media is a fantastic approach to increasing brand recognition outside of the more conventional marketing channels.
You may retarget customers who have visited your website and made purchases on several platforms, including Facebook.
These viewers have granularity comparable to what Google Ads provides. Among other choices, you may separate previous converts and offer to advertise directly to users who visited a specific page or selection of pages.
Improved Targeting
One of the main advantages of paid advertising is that you may target a particular audience based on their behaviours, actions, interests, regions, jobs, and hobbies.
Instead of reaching a large audience that could or might not be interested in your content, your adverts will appear for individuals most similar to your potential customers. Additionally, retargeting advertisements may be created using this data.
Speed to Market
As with any paid advertisement, you can quickly launch content for immediate viewing. As soon as your campaign goes live, individuals on your selected social networks will start seeing your adverts.
Greater Content Visibility
You don’t need to wait for others to come to you. You may show people your content at the frequency and cost you want with advertisements.
Assists in Monitoring Competitors'
You may examine their competition’s most recent trends and actions using social media advertising platforms like Facebook Ads. You can decide how to promote your goods and services most effectively by looking at what your competitors are currently doing.
These can be marketing or business techniques that your advisors might modify and use in your strategy.
Disadvantages
Limited Ad Space
The most important concept to grasp about social media is that there is a finite amount of ad inventory.
Even though Facebook has over 3 billion members, each of them only has one news feed, giving you just one opportunity to attract clients.
Greater competition results from limited ad spend and space, and greater competition results in higher costs. Because clicks on Google and Bing are frequently more expensive, you can require a big budget to launch your advertising.
Expensive
For a brand to become well-known through social media advertising, a lot of consistency is needed. This appears to be a simple task in principle.
However, social media management will require much of the business owner’s time and patience regarding social media advertising.
Not to add that you will probably require a solid year to see results immediately; thus, if you want to accelerate your advertising activities, raise your social media advertising.
It does, however, come at a steep cost. You must be prepared to assume the financial risk of social media advertising.
Presents a High Volume of Content
Nowadays, the Web and various Social Media sites are accessible to more than half of the world’s population. As a result, more companies utilize social media to advertise and build brand recognition.
However, a ton of information is produced by businesses that run marketing and advertising efforts on social media. As a result, the likelihood of a potential buyer discovering your brand is quite slim.
Therefore, raising brand recognition is not a simple process for business owners, especially those still learning web marketing.
The Verdict on Organic vs Paid Social Media
If your company lacks the funds to carry out a comprehensive sponsored social media plan, consider concentrating on organic social media.
Write thoughtful content and actively engage with your customers online. Prioritize your sponsored social media efforts if your company has a significant marketing budget and an urgent need to bring in new clients.
So what’s better?
Paid and organic social strategies work best when social marketers deploy them together. While paid social media strategy attracts new views from those who would not have seen you otherwise, organic social media should help you develop your unique brand voice and engage your current followers.
How to Integrate Organic & Paid Social Media Strategies
Have social networking content that is successfully functioning naturally? You might always promote it as a paid ad or sponsored content to increase its visibility if you have any advertising budget.
Promoting the post will only increase your audience and engagement because it is already popular with your current followers. You might even gain more followers for your social media profile as a result.
Strategically Boost Top-Performing Content
Have social media content that is effectively performing organically? You still may promote it as a paid ad or sponsored content to increase its visibility if you have any advertising budget available.
Promoting the content will increase your audience and interaction because it is already popular with your current followers. You could even gain more followers for your social media presence as a result.
Target your ads to people similar to your organic audience
The more naturally your social media presence has evolved, the more information you have about your target audience or client.
Where do they live? What is their age? What do they have an interest in? What issues are they currently dealing with? How do you assist them?
Utilize all of this data while creating your adverts. This is when your effort in cultivating solid bonds with your audience will start to bear fruit.
Use retargeting ads to stay connected to your organic audience
Because you’re contacting customers you already know, retargeting advertising may be quite profitable at a cheap cost. These are frequent visitors who found you through social media or your website on their own.
They may have gone to your website or profile or even left a shopping cart, for all you know. The thought behind this is that the perfect advertisement can persuade them if they only need to be reminded to return and convert.
Leverage Paid Social Efforts To Retarget Inbound Traffic
Produce content on low-competition, high-value keywords to drive visitors to your website using organic social media campaigns. To direct these visitors to the crucial sales pages on your website, use several calls to action.
Then, use sponsored social content to retarget those website visitors who stay on these sites the longest.
Ultimately, you will save money while getting better results by focusing your marketing budget on the most promising clients.
Make sure all your messaging is aligned
Additionally, it’s crucial to ensure that all of your content is aligned and consistent. The only difference between your paid ads and organic content should be that the paid content is meant to draw in new clients.
This is crucial since some users may click on your main profile after seeing your paid advertisement.
Combine organic and paid KPIs
You may gain better insights into the success of your campaigns—and even the general health of your brand—by observing the relationships between organic and sponsored content KPIs. Therefore, be sure to combine the reach, total views, and other KPIs for the two types of content.
Know the Purpose Each Channel has for Your Marketing Efforts
Paid social is a fantastic tool in your online marketing toolkit since it provides effective targeting choices. Paid social media, on its own, does not allow you to get the most return on investment from your social media activities.
On the other hand, natural social media platforms may be just as effective for connecting with your target audience and fostering a sense of community.
Wrapping Up
Smaller companies are now more able to compete with well-known, significant brands, thanks to modern customers.
Smaller businesses are frequently more able to satisfy consumers’ needs for openness, direct communication with brands, authenticity, brands that share their values, and a personal connection than legacy brands.
Social media is the most effective way to reach out to these audiences and provide them with a sense of community. In the end, choosing between organic social strategy and paid social is unrealistic.
The current marketing strategy that really works combines these two strategies in a way that strengthens each one more than if it were used alone.
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