Social networks have become a place where your customers read peer reviews, familiarize themselves with your products, and interact with your brand actively.
Given that, it’s not surprising that the number of businesses using social media will reach 90% by 2020, making it more difficult for smaller brands to get noticed.
Precisely because of that, you need to rethink your approach and stop observing social networks as a free business promotion option.
Instead of racking your brains trying to choose between paid or organic social, you need to merge these tactics together.
Here is why (and how) you should do so.
Why is Organic Social Still Important?
Organic social media is the backbone of your business promotion. It gives you the opportunity to establish personal relationships with your customers, humanize your brand, and build trust with your customers. Here is how they can help you grow your brand.
- Boosting brand awareness
The major goal of social networks is to help you build a unique brand and raise people’s awareness of it. They let you tell a story about your brand, show off your unique identity, and inform your customers about what your core values are.
With the help of social networks, you can create engaging and interactive content that grabs people’s attention, evokes emotions, and inspires them to visit your site and buy from you. They let you educate, entertain, and motivate your followers. This content can written, photographed, created with a design app like Canva, or produced with a video creator such as InVideo.
Great social media content helps you rise above your competitors in the overcrowded social media ecosystem. It is not about promoting your products or pushing aggressive sales pitches. Instead, it’s all about providing actionable tips, informing your customers about the latest industry trends, and spreading inspiration. Once people start seeing the value of your content, they will come back to your profile regularly, share your posts, and increase your brand exposure organically.
- Providing customer services
Today’s customers are tech-savvy. They expect brands to communicate with them across multiple channels and answer their questions instantly.
And, this is where social networks step in.
There are numerous ways to use these channels to provide exceptional customer support.
First off, you can implement chatbots to provide real-time answers during your off hours. Communicating with your customers irrespective of their time zone or your working hours will give you a great competitive advantage and increase your conversion rates.
Also, using social media monitoring tools, you can listen to your customers and track their mentions of your brand or products. This way, you will be able to participate in their conversations and provide helpful tips that will convert them into long-term customers.
- Building trust
Modern customers don’t trust branded content anymore. Instead, they want to hear what your average customer has to say. With the help of social networks, you can generate positive social proof easily.
Ask your customers to rate and review you on Facebook. You could also create a brief Facebook poll and ask them to answer your questions.
Share your customers’ testimonials with the public and spread the positive word of mouth about your brand.
Finally, you can get creative and inspire people to share user-generated content. This is what great way to share some gorgeous photos or videos of your product created by your customers and show your future customers that your products are worth their attention.
Why Should You Use Paid Social?
Organic social can do so much for your brand. Then, why do we use paid campaigns? Well, the new Facebook algorithm has changed things radically. To boost user experience, its News Feed prioritizes organic posts by your followers’ friends over branded content. Precisely because of that, your high-quality content may go unseen.
This is where paid social shines.
- Precise targeting options
Many marketers believe that casting the net wide works best for them. Unfortunately, this is not true. Targeting wrong customers means driving irrelevant traffic to your site and generating no conversions, right?
To target your customers precisely, you should use advanced targeting options PPC provides.
For example, Facebook lets you select your right audiences by their demographics, interests, location, behavior, and connections.
Apart from helping you save money on pointless clicks, Facebook’s awesome features like Audience Insights inform you about your target audience and let you adapt your strategies to their needs.
- Increasing your brand visibility
Paid ads have a prominent location on social platforms, making your content and offers prominent. And, greater brand exposure results in a better click-through rate. According to some recent stats, PPC can boost your website traffic by 300%. This is why paid social is great for evoking FOMO and promoting any form of time-sensitive content and offers.
- Boosting conversions
Organic social is user-friendly, but it is paid ads that drive more conversions. Namely, people clicking on your ads are more interested in your specific offers and ready to buy from you.
Merging Paid and Organic Social Promotion
So, which one is better- organic or paid social media marketing? I believe you’ve got the point so far. Instead of separating paid and organic social media, you can merge them and give your branding efforts a boost.
Below are a few steps you should take.
- Choose the perfect timing for both your organic and paid content. Track your followers’ behavior and determine when the best time to post on social networks is. You can even use tools like Facebook’s ad scheduling optimization to publish your ads on Facebook only when your customers are there, too.
- Use PPC targeting to find out more about your audiences and adapt your content creation and promotion strategy to their interests.
- Remarket to your former customers, people from your email list, and your site visitors. With Facebook’s retargeting options, even this is possible. With its latest update, you can even target only those people that engaged with your content on Facebook or Instagram.
- Test the performance of both your organic and paid campaigns regularly. The point is to find the major pain points in your strategy and eliminate them efficiently.
Over to You
In 2019, the social media landscape will be even fiercer for small businesses. This is why marketers need to stop choosing between organic and paid social and start observing them as two sides of the same coin. Only when working in harmony can organic and paid search deliver greater results.