– Written by Chris Watson –
Organic and paid social media are frequently regarded as distinct channels, however, they are profoundly interconnected and should be viewed in a symbiotic manner. In this blog post, Chris Watson, our Head of Paid Media, alongside Matt Rook, Managing Director at Hotwolf – our creative agency partner and an expert in organic social – explore the functions of organic and paid social media and emphasise the significance of adopting a balanced strategy.
Paid social entails the strategic placement of advertisements on social platforms, offering a remarkable array of formats and conversion actions that these ads can employ. In contrast, organic social encompasses all unpaid social media marketing activities, such as content creation, social media management and fostering engagement. Achieving a balance between organic and paid elements in your social media campaigns is essential for maximising your social media ROI (Return on Investment).
Written by Matt Rook
If there’s one undeniable fact about social media, it’s that each year enhances the significance of a brand’s social channels. Social media acts as the digital high street that brands simply cannot ignore. As we increasingly spend our time online, particularly on social platforms, it is crucial for brands seeking attention to ensure their channels and content are as captivating and engaging as possible.
Well-crafted, thoughtfully designed social channels offer brands a relatively unique opportunity: at a comparatively low cost, they provide the chance to discover an audience, nurture long-term relationships and build a community of advocates.
Organic social media presents another critical Unique Selling Point (USP): unlike nearly any other medium, it levels the playing field, allowing yesterday’s little-known start-ups to evolve into billion-pound entities, contending alongside well-established brands with deep pockets. Strategy and creativity are no longer the sole domain of blue-chip companies.
That is, of course, until you introduce paid advertising – but more on that later.
On a macro level, there is arguably a straightforwardz, successful strategy for effective social media management and content creation: develop a strategy and start posting! Test your strategy, push it to its limits, review everything, absorb your learnings and incorporate them into next month’s content. Plan. Execute. Review – continuously progressing.
At the content level, our experience has led to a successful approach grounded in three content pillars: Information, Inspiration and Validation. Successful channels typically feature a blend of posts that consistently fall into these categories. Of course, there are countless other valuable tips and tricks, but perhaps none is as vital as this: envision your brand as a person – develop and solidify your identity and stick with it. Avoid merely shouting about your brand or products. Likewise, refrain from jumping on every trend, instead, focus on those genuinely relevant to your brand. Stay consistent. Be engaging. Or useful. Or neither – simply publish content that brings a smile to people’s faces or enhances their lives, even briefly, in a way only your brand can.
Effective organic social content provides brands with a unique chance to engage in dialogue with their customers – existing, new and prospective. It’s a creative sandbox where brands can experiment with new messages, launch new products and services and receive immediate feedback on what’s effective (and critically, what isn’t). The data gathered can then instil the confidence needed to determine where to allocate media support, ensuring maximised success.
The power of paid social mediaAs a growing portion of the global population turns to social media for inspiration, brand discovery and consideration prior to making a purchase – whether directly through social media platform or via other channels – enhancing a robust organic social media strategy with paid activity has become essential for many brands.
With the rise of TikTok and the subsequent surge in the dominance of User-Generated Content (UGC) online, brands often find themselves increasingly marginalised. Consequently, promoting organic content through paid activity can enable brands to reach a broader audience of potential followers and consumers, encourging them to follow the brand and engage with its organic content.
Beyond enhancing organic visibility, social media offers brands an ever-expanding avenue for brand awareness, consideration and product acquisition. As traditional paid search evolves into a broader concept of ‘search’, users are now just as inclined to look to social media for inspiration, consideration and purchase decisions as they are to traditional paid search and SEO channels. Developing a robust paid social strategy has become crucial for brands aiming to diversify their approaches and ensure visibility across all potential customer platforms, regardless of their preferences.
Social media is not a monolithic channel, each platform varies, with diverse content and ad formats and distinct purposes for its audience. This variation provides brands with an excellent opportunity to tailor their content appropriately for each platform, maximising engagement from users. For instance, a car insurance brand might utilise TikTok to engage and entertain its audience, thereby boosting brand awareness and favourability. Meanwhile, they could employ more conversion-focussed messaging on Facebook, where users might be more inclined to explore and purchase from brands advertising on this platform.
Moreover, the distinct purposes of various social platforms are complemented by differences in demographics and data collected from users across these platforms. This diversity opens up paid social opportunities for brands across all sectors, as unique targeting options allow brands to selectively utilise an ideal mix of platforms to reach their audience. B2B brands can discover established opportunities on LinkedIn, where targeting can be based on users’ professional backgrounds, while emerging brands might find prospects on Reddit, where targeting revolves around specific communities or sub-reddits. On the other hand, B2C brands might experience success through interest-based targeting on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
With varied consumption patterns and demographic distributions, brands can not only focus on short-term goals of converting existing users into buyers but can also boost brand awareness among younger generations, ensuring they maintain a competitive edge. Additionally, all platforms provide extensive data collection and visualisation tools, enabling marketers to remain at the forefront of achieving ROI targets and making necessary adjustments to meet these objectives.
How to combine paid and organic social media When conducting paid social campaigns, users who encounter the ads often click on a brand’s social profile to gain a better understanding of its offerings, culture and overall ethos. Consequently, a brand lacking a well-curated social media presence risks losing potential customers as a result.
Organic social enables you to engage with your followers, but only to a certain extent. Not all followers will see your posts, as platforms are increasingly urging brands to advertise in order to “remove the brakes” on their feeds. Therefore, even if you do not run traditional ads, it’s beneficial to boost your organic posts, even with modest budgets – such as £20 or more per post.
Building a robust profile is essential to maximise the effectiveness of your paid activities. Additionally, posting organic content enables you to explore various marketing angles for your brand at little to no cost. This allows you to repeatedly test different approaches, analyse the data and then determine which messages should form the core of your paid advertising strategy (and beyond!).
To optimise ROI and enhance the effectiveness of your social channels, it’s crucial to implement strategies that acknowledge the connection between your organic feed and paid advertisements. One clear approach is to utilise paid ads to draw attention to your organic posts – a technique particularly beneficial for increasing engagement with posts related to competitions, for example.
To preserve creative uniformity, we suggest employing the same agency responsible for crafting your organic feed to also produce your paid media assets. This approach helps ensure that your advertisements maintain the same tone and aesthetic as your organic content. However, it is important to note that unless you are promoting organic content directly, these ads will only be visible to the audience you target. Do not hesitate to stretch the stylistic limits set for organic content in order to optimise performance for your paid activities.
EIT Urban Mobility (EIT UM) is an initiative by the European Union with the goal of accelerating the transition towards sustainable mobility. It provides online training programmes to enhance the skills of Urban Mobility professionals throughout Europe. EIT UM came to us with a distinct challenge: they had invested considerable resources into producing 50 videos for their ‘WebTV’ YouTube playlist and needed to ensure these videos reached their intended audience.
Recognising this as a brand awareness endeavour, we leveraged YouTube, the world’s second-largest search engine, along with discovery platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter to address this challenge.
We launched a new YouTube channel, Urban Mobility Explained (UMX), for these WebTV videos and set forth the following objectives, including a goal aimed at a lower funnel impact:
The channel launch encompassed several crucial activities:
The results of our brand awareness campaign against the set targets were remarkable:
This combination of paid and organic social media efforts led to these outstanding results, as we maximised our reach to our target audience. By integrating both paid and organic strategies, we ensured not only a well-maintained social media presence and YouTube channel, but also reached the substantial pool of users required for success.
Social media best practicesCollaborate with specialists who comprehend your brand and excel in their respective fields. Opt for a creative agency to develop your content and a media planning and buying agency to manage your paid social campaigns. Additionally, if possible, select two agencies that are already familiar with and understand each other, as this will undoubtedly lead to a more seamless working relationship. Spoiler alert – like Hotwolf and Passion!
Before venturing into paid advertising, ensure that you have established a successful organic strategy. Once this foundation is in place, you will have a clear understanding of your brand identity on social media, have analysed the data to determine what maximises engagement and refined your content pillars. In essence, you are now ideally positioned to initiate advertising campaigns, confident that your brand’s social media presence is robust and ready to be showcased to both existing and prospective customers or fans.
Examine your social media analytics weekly to verify that performance aligns with your anticipated results. Start by targeting a broad audience to gather data, then divide this audience into smaller segments to conduct A/B testing on results and creative elements.
Conduct a more comprehensive review of your data monthly to gain insights into what strategies are effective and which are not. Use this understanding to guide your marketing decisions for the coming weeks and months.
Allocate your budget according to the size of your audience. The optimal frequency for paid social campaigns is three, while retargeting campaigns should aim for closer to five. Your media expenditure should be determined by your audience size, rather than trying to fit your audience into a predetermined media budget.
Take the time to consider which social media platform will best meet your brand’s needs. Identify the important metrics and understand their relevance before deciding which specific platforms will help you achieve your objectives. When engaging in paid social advertising, consider which social media targeting options will best support reaching your goals.
Decide which metrics are essential for tracking and which analytics tools are most suitable for measuring success. As a starting point, we recommend utilising the data gathered within the platform itself and integrating these platforms with your preferred analytics tool (such as Google Analytics 4, Piwki, etc.).
This is especially crucial for paid social efforts. Although all social media platforms offer extensive targeting options within their marketing setups, nothing quite rivals the effectiveness of utilising first-party data – particularly for niche brands or those significantly investing in e-commerce. First-party data can be employed to retarget users, to encourage repeat purchases or to convert those who have abandoned their shopping baskets. Additionally, these data lists can serve as a foundation for identifying prospect audiences with similar attributes, thereby capturing targeting opportunities that might otherwise be overlooked.
The future of paid and organic social mediaGiven that social media has become an integral part of the daily routines of a large segment of the global population and as search increasingly integrates social media into user purchasing behaviour, maintaining a robust organic and paid social media presence can significantly enhance a brand’s ability to connect with its target audience. This will continue to grow in importance, so it is crucial to invest both in your paid and organic social media strategies to stay ahead.
We hope you found our social media tips beneficial. Remember, by ensuring that your organic media feeds are well-curated and regularly updated, brands can use these platforms to humanise their identity and build community. Meanwhile, paid media activities can be employed to boost visibility and guide users further along the purchasing journey. Contact us today to discuss how we can enhance your social media strategy through both organic and paid social approaches.