Confused about all the different forms of digital marketing out there? Our experts have you covered! Let’s take a deep dive into the differences between organic social and paid social and how to make the most out of social media advertising.
What is Paid Social?
In the world of marketing, there are numerous ways in which you can utilise online platforms to advertise your products and services. One of the main ways this is done is through paid sponsorship across social media channels. This form of digital advertising can be achieved through building out an advertising campaign or sponsoring organic content. Any promotion that costs money on a social media platform, falls under Paid Social.
The role of Paid Social
Paid social is a way to push your content out to huge new audiences, which can be great for raising brand awareness and to reach new prospects for your business in order for you to get more sales.
What is Organic Social?
Most of us are familiar with this one! Organic social media is when you can post directly from your personal or business account on a social media platform for free and share your thoughts and ideas or promote your products or services.
The people who will see these posts tend to be a percentage of your followers, your followers’ followers (when a post is shared), location searches or users following or searching for the hashtags that you have used in your post.
The role of Organic Social
Organic social media has an important role to play when it comes to positioning your brand and should always remain a core element of your wider digital marketing strategy. Your organic posts may not always make a huge impact but will ultimately help you to build a relationship with your followers. By consistently posting engaging organic content, you’ll be able to paint a picture of who you are as a brand, solidifying your personality, tone of voice and respectability within your industry.
Utilising Paid Social
Here are some of the ways in which you can utilise paid social media across social media giants Facebook and LinkedIn in order to increase lead generation, e-commerce sales and your overall online presence:
Customer personas
Having a solid idea of who your customers are and building out customer personas will give you a head start when it comes to audience targeting. You can target demographics such as age, gender, location and language, to relationship status and education status.
Reaching your audience on Facebook & Instagram
One of the main benefits to using paid social is the ability to laser target the right audience. More than half of the world now uses social media so paid promotion is a great way to get your brand in front of your ideal customer.
Interest-based targeting on Facebook & Instagram
A key area of audience targeting is through interest-based targeting. With no thanks to the forever evolving algorithms, interest targeting can help put your audience into categories based on previous content and pages they have engaged with on the app. This can help to make sure that you are targeting people who are interested in what you’re selling, or have shown some interest in your products or services online.
The above methods combined can be an effective formula for success. For example, if you are selling clothing products designed for a bridal party, you can target people who are “recently engaged” and have interests in “fashion”.
LinkedIn Audience Targeting
For professional and more service based promotion, LinkedIn can be a great platform to use.
LinkedIn Audience Targeting allows you to target set demographics, as well as audiences based on their job title, seniority, industry and company size. It is a way of getting your messaging in front of key decision makers at businesses who would be your ideal customer.
Data driven results
One of the key benefits to advertising through paid social media is the data this generates and how this data can be used. Through tracking conversion goals, we can see exactly what kind of content is generating the most engagement, and subsequently, sales! Using this data enables us to then optimise the best performing ads and copy to expand our audience targeting and test out new strategies.
Ad spend & budgets
It also helps to indicate where to spend money. With paid social, you are in charge of your budget and you can put more money into what is working well for you, and pull back spend on any areas that are not generating the results you want.
A/B testing
You can do A/B testing to figure out exactly what elements of your ad are generating the best results. This is really important when you want to test out different image assets, or different styles of copy. Having solid data will then help you make more informed decisions about future campaigns and strategies.
Measurable results
Having measurable results is key when it comes to marketing and scaling up a business. Paid ads allow us to get results fast, but it also enables us to look at the bigger picture when it comes to our advertising and use the data we have collected to our own advantage.
Retargeting
One of the key benefits of using a paid advertising strategy is the ability to retarget prospects. Retargeting campaigns allow you to touch base with customers who have previously bought from you, or have engaged and showed interest in your brand online. This can be a key element to advertising successfully, especially when using a sales funnel approach to getting conversions.
Creative Paid Social
Variety and flexibility is key in getting more clicks and converting more sales. Using paid social advertising allows you to create dynamic content that can target a number of placements across social media platforms such as Facebook & Instagram.
Creating different types of ads such as video and image-based ads, as well as testing these across different placements, will help you determine what kind of content your audience is most likely to engage with, and where they are most likely to engage with your brand.
Not only does paid social help increase your brand awareness, but it is also seen as a way to build credibility for your brand and speed up brand development.
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