Marketers often hesitate about how to build their strategy on social media. Is it better to use paid advertising or create organic content to attract users? Both are effective strategies, but they work differently.
It is important to understand well what each one is about to evaluate which one is appropriate for your company.
Paid social media marketing
Companies pay a platform to ensure they reach a specific target audience thanks to segmentation. Marketers can invest money to boost existing posts or produce ads from scratch.
Advantages:
- It supports targeting, so you can reach relevant prospects based on their activity, age, location, etc.
- Boost lead generation by helping content not go unnoticed.
- It helps reach new audiences quickly, as a single well-directed campaign could attract many new followers.
- It can be easily measured. There are many analytical tools to evaluate the results of the launched campaigns.
- It is profitable. Typically, pay-per-click (PPC) charges apply, so you only have to pay if users interact directly with your ads.
Disadvantages:
- It requires a budget since you have to pay for social media marketing campaigns.
- There are no guarantees, as you are never completely sure that the results will be positive or how much the return on investment will be.
- There are space limitations for ads. This is because there is a lot of competition, which increases the cost per click.
Organic social media marketing
These are posts that appear in the feed of users who follow an account. Therefore, it is the content that is shared for free.
Being a type of self-promotion, because it is its channel, brands need to create valuable content that catches people’s attention.
Advantages:
- Increase brand awareness. A strategy for consistent organic social media campaigns can make your business familiar to current and future customers.
- It offers longer-lasting results since it can last over time.
- Promotes the social customer service strategy. It allows you to offer an instant and free channel for people to contact the brand.
- It helps you connect more with customers since the content focuses more on their needs than on selling something.
- It creates a brand identity since it allows customers to see who the company is.
Disadvantages:
- It is intensive work. Generating quality content and interacting with the audience is a process that requires time, as it is not something that can be achieved overnight.
- Offers less flexibility. Organic social media is not as precise in targeting specific demographics.
- The content is shown almost only to the brand’s followers, making it difficult to reach other people.
What is best for your business?
The reality is that there is no one strategy better than another. Both offer benefits for companies, they just adapt to different needs and priorities.
While paid social networks allow you to reach a broader audience to increase conversions, organic social networks aim to reach the audience that already follows the brand to create a connection with them and retain them.
Drive superior organic content
If you have social media campaigns of organic content in different formats that have worked very well, such as a video or a photo that has gone viral, you can pay to increase its reach on different social channels.
Viral content is valuable, and paid posts allow you to capitalize on successful organic efforts.
Use different types of content
Through a paid social media campaign, you can quickly test different types of content and collect data on the effectiveness of each.
In this way, it is possible to obtain accurate and fast results on the performance of a publication.
Measure results
Nobody wants a paid campaign to fail, but neither does organic content. Both require significant investments, be it money or time.
Therefore, it is best to use analysis tools to determine where changes need to be made to obtain the best results.
Both paid and free social media campaigns have their advantages and disadvantages. The important thing is that you know how to use each one in your business to get the most out of it.
If you don’t know how to do it, don’t worry! Contact us and our experts will help you to create your social media marketing strategies.
