ReDrew Innovations

“Organic social media has allowed brands the opportunity to generate immense recognition and conversion”. This quote comes from my last article which touched on organic social media marketing. Today we are flipping the coin to talk about paid social media marketing. Is there still room for paid social media after the upsurge in brands creating organic social media posts? 

What Is Paid and Organic Social Media

According to Hootsuite, the leading social media dashboard, paid social media is another word for advertising. It is when a brand pays money to have its content shared with a specific targeted audience, who are most likely to convert.

As discussed last week, Organic Social Media is any free content that users, businesses, and brands share with the world via their social platforms.

Example of Paid and Organic Social Media

If you’re one of the 10 million plus followers of Garyvee, an example of an organic social media post would be his latest post popping up on your Instagram social media feed.

If you see a Garyvee post pop up on your Instagram social media feed but you don’t follow Garyvee. This would be an example of paid social media as marketers paid to “boost” this organic social media post to you, someone they think might be potentially interested in converting to a consumer.

How Do Marketers Use Paid Social Differently Than Organic Social

Paid social media is how brands can get consumers to start their journey in the marketing funnel. It is the best way for brands to target new audiences on social media and convert them into consumers. Businesses and organizations use paid promotion on social too:

• raise brand awareness and attract new followers
• promote their newest deal, content, event, etc.
• generate leads
• drive conversions (including e-commerce sales)

Whereas organic social media posts are used to nurture a connection with your customers at scale. For example, brands use organic social to:

• establish their personality and voice
• build relationships by sharing informative, entertaining, and/or inspiring content
• engage customers at every stage of their buying journey
• support their customers with customer service

What Is Core, Custom, and Lookalike Audiences

To best utilize paid media, marketers need to reach the right audience, people who care about your brand, product, or service. By using Facebook‘s ad targeting tools, marketers can do just that.

Facebook automatically shows your ads to people who are most likely to find your ads relevant. However, this target audience is broad. Marketers can target their ads specifically by sectioning one of Facebook’s three audience selection tools, core, custom, or lookalike audiences.

What Are The Differences Between Core, Custom, and Lookalike Audiences

• Core audience: You set the rules for where your ads are delivered. Can be based on location, demographics, behavior, connections, and interests.
• Customer Audiences: Get In touch with people who already know your business. As Known as the people who have already shown interest in your business. This can be consumers from the brand’s contact lists, site visitors, or app users.
• Lookalike Audiences: A lookalike audience is a way your ads can reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they share similar characteristics to your existing customers.

focusing on the right audience will allow your brand to connect with the consumers most interested in purchasing your product or service. Choosing the right influencer can also helps brands to find the right audience.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Digital Marketing Institute defines influencers marketing as product placement or endorsement on social media networks through an influencer (a person with a social following and deemed an expert in a certain area).

Various Social Media Platform Influencers

Instagram

• Cristiano Ronaldo is a famous Portuguese football player who also happened to be the best paid influencer on Instagram. With 489 million followers, Ronaldo makes almost $1.6 million per post he does in collaborations with brands. His latest collaboration was a paid partnership with Clear Men shampoo.

TikTok

• Charli D’Amelio a social media personality is well known for being the most followed influencer on TikTok for 2 years, until September when she was surpassed by Khabane Lame. However, she is still the highest-paid influencer on TikTok with an estimated annual earning of $17.5 million.

YouTube

• With over 106 million subscribers. MrBeast is the highest-paid YouTube influencer in 2021. Making a gross revenue of $54 million. Which happens to be more than any YouTube creator in history according to Forbes magazine.

How Marketers Can Track The Effectiveness Of Their Influencer Marketing Campaigns

There are many tools specifically for marketers to track the success of their influencer marketing campaigns.

On the simple end marketers can set goals and KPIs which will make clear to marketers and influencers the objective of the marketing campaign. Marketers can also use Google Analytics to monitor the total number of conversions and the monetary value of conversions that occurred as a result of referrals from each network (DeLane).

Some include social listening tools like Talkwalker which offers social listening and also provides visual recognition analysis so it can track imagery and find influencers on platforms like Instagram or Snapchat.

Upfluence uses software that indexes and updates influencer profiles in real-time and analyzes all of the influencer’s content for reach and engagement.

Grin is the all-in-one creator management platform that helps brands build partnerships. It helps discover influencers, reach out and nurture relationships and report and analyze campaigns.

Conclusion

There should always be room for paid social media strategies in a marketer’s social media plan. In fact, from here on out I want you to think about paid and organic social media as a two-pronged plan in any marketing strategy. Paid social media strategies are used to attract new customers while organic social media strategies are used to sustain any new relationship you might make with paid social media.