With the growth of Social Media Marketing in the last few years, by now the majority of people should know that without a Social Media presence, your business may as well not exist. 

Now, on Social Media – it is more than just company updates and building your online presence. It’s now turned into a Marketing strategy that can cover the full experience of a customer journey. 

From customer acquisition to remarketing, retention and service – you can do pretty much all of your Digital Marketing strategies through just 1 Social Media platform alone. 

The biggest thing that we see as a Digital Marketing agency is people often overlooking the importance of both Paid and Organic Social strategies together; instead of prioritising one over the other.

Organic Social Vs Paid Social should be seen as a couple that are equally as important, rather than a discussion as to which one should be focussed on the most. When both strategies of Social Media marketing are done correctly, these methods have their part to play across the part that gets your audience rushing to your website to find out more.

In this post, we’re going to cover how one supports the other and how you should be utilising both methods to their fullest effect – but, what actually is the difference between the 2? 

Let’s start with Organic Social…

Organic Social Media marketing is any activity through your Social Media platforms, that isn’t a paid promotion. It’s taking advantage of the free Social Media tools to help build and engage with your online following – as well as posting content directly to your chosen Social media platforms. 

This type of content can vary from imagery, videos as well as written content which can be used for different reasons: promoting your business, strengthening your brand awareness and image as well as building a relationship of trust with your audience. 

When developing your Organic Social Media marketing strategy, it’s important to lay out your foundations first. It can be hard to build an audience from scratch, in an authentic way; Organic platforms should be seen as more of a network and an online community. Anyone can buy followers and seem bigger and more important than what they really are, but with today’s technology involved within these platforms – they will be found out quickly enough. 

One of the biggest keys to Organic Social success is scheduling your regular posts either weeks or months ahead (there are many different scheduling tools to choose from depending on your requirements). By scheduling your Social Media posts in advance, allows you to free up more time to get creative and focus on reactive marketing. 

It’s also important to get creative with your organic posts. By posting memes, relatable world events, celebrity news, questions, polls and stories will help encourage your audience to engage more with your posts. By playing around and gathering data to get a better understanding of what it is your audience wants to see, will also help you get better engagement results which will improve your follower count over time. 

Stay on top of trends. This is another big key to growing your audience and reach organically through Social Media. Stay on top of all of the latest trends and use them to your advantage. For example, since the release and push of Instagram Reels’, people are seeing a lot more reach when posting Reels’ than they were posting regular imagery. It’s important to always check what’s trending, as they are forever evolving. 

But, what about Paid Social Media?

Paid Social Media marketing is a money-making machine that just continues to expand on its features. Social Media platforms always try to entice businesses to create ads and boost posts like there’s no tomorrow – but it’s important to make sure to create and implement a thorough Paid Social strategy, with a sufficient budget and a reasonable target ROAS before moving forward. 

When it comes to Paid Social, we always recommend getting expert advice at a very minimum, or partnering with a marketing agency that will do it for you. But, if you’re just starting out or want to do it yourself, here’s a list of key elements to focus on. 

Let’s start off with creating eye-catching creatives. By designing strong creatives, there is a lot more opportunity of enticing your audience to click on your ad. Content creation isn’t for anyone, but there are plenty of useful tools to help you, such as Canva. 

Your Ad Copy is also just as crucial. Although your Ads’ creatives must be eye-catching, your copy plays a part that is just as important. By creating Ad Copy that stops your audience scrolling, this will help make more people click on your ad. 

Make sure you are building your campaigns out correctly. By building your campaigns efficiently, this will make life so much easier when it comes to monitoring, testing and optimising your campaigns. 

Whenever you create and launch a new ad or campaign, you will always be collecting valuable data which will be required further down the line. With this data, you can evaluate your campaign’s results to see which ones are getting the better results. It is also useful when testing different assets to help determine which style generates the best results. 

Approximately 97% of website visitors leave a website before making a purchase, so it is also important to keep your retargeting strategy in mind. By retargeting your previous website viewers, you can help improve your Ad Engagement by up to 400% and close on even more sales. 

So you’re probably now thinking… How do you prioritise these as equally as each other?