Now more than ever, including an engaging and evolving social media strategy within the traditional marketing mix is becoming essential to establishing a successful overarching marketing strategy.
As social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have adopted algorithms similar to Google’s in an effort to guide positive user experiences and boost the most engaging content, organic social media has suffered a massive decline.
Consequently, many businesses have navigated their spending and efforts towards paid social media, which places content in front of desired and targeted audiences for a price, much like advertisements.
However, while your organic social media can limit the number of people who may see your content and hinder your organic reach, the value that organic content can create for your company is incomparable, and can complement that of paid social methods to create highly effective results in your marketing success.
What is organic social media, and how does it benefit a business?
Organic social media encompasses content that’s delivered to your audience and followers by using the free services and tools each social network has to offer. Because organic social media is not promotional or sponsored, it is often regarded as the most effective way for a business or entity to engage with its social community and followers, which can ultimately build trust and foster authentic relationships with potential customers. This is especially evidenced in the significant rise of influencer marketing and influencer partnerships being shared on platforms like Instagram. In this context, consumers have expressed that they are more prone to trust posts made organically by influencers as opposed to posts that are clearly sponsored or have a paid aspect behind them.
Organic content helps build brands
Sharing organic content helps brands and businesses to develop and shape their brand tone of voice, which communicates their values, vision, and culture to their audience. Additionally, it also opens communication channels for businesses to learn more about their customers through direct interactions, surveys, customer feedback, and reviews.
As social networks become increasingly prominent spaces for consumers to make buying decisions and for e-commerce to thrive, engagement with customers on these social platforms proves to be a best practice for your organic social strategy.
As marketers, we not only seek to understand the benefits behind certain concepts but also how they will contribute to driving results and achieving goals. Let’s explore the functionalities and rewards that organic social media can bring.
How can organic social media benefit your business?:
How can organic social media benefit your business?
- It can increase the validity of your business as well as drive consumer reviews, recommendations, and electronic word of mouth, which is highly trusted in this day and age.
- It is one of the most effective ways to engage with potential consumers, which can contribute to higher conversion rates when paired strategically with paid tactics that are also aligned with your organic messaging.
- Organic social allows you to interact with your customers on a personal level at each stage of the buyer’s journey. As connecting with your customers can drive loyalty and build strong relationships among your client base, this is a crucial benefit of organic social media that cannot be purchased or fabricated.
- Organic social can increase your brand awareness and strengthen the message being communicated to your potential customers, that set you up well for long term success and consumer retention.
However, it’s impossible to ignore some of the disadvantages of organic social media. Firstly, because of ranking algorithms that now exist on practically every social network, organic content is only likely to be seen by a small number of your followers, regardless of where you post. This can prove to be a hindrance in not only reaching your target audience but also in bringing in new target audiences.
Additionally, organic social media strategies can be very time-consuming to construct and deliver, and require quite a bit of testing before producing results on par with the marketing efforts given. Given this reality, it is best to use organic social as a complement to paid social marketing efforts and other marketing tactics to form the best strategy for your business.
Here are 6 ways you can successfully integrate organic social into your marketing mix:
- Tailor your content to be high-quality and aligned with your brand or business across all touchpoints in terms of aesthetics, brand personality, messaging, and more. Displaying consistency across your content and touchpoints builds trust among your audience.
- Make sure to focus on producing fresh, yet relevant content that can help, provide answers for, or educate your consumers. Posting content that does not risk becoming irrelevant strengthens your authenticity and can even increase the shareability of your posts while driving further engagement from your existing and outside audiences.
- Research what types of content tend to perform better on certain social platforms. Many research studies have found that video content on Facebook performs very well and attracts high engagement from users. Although you may not consider yourself a video guru or be prone to posting video content regularly, it may be worth creatively experimenting with different types of content to see if you can attain higher engagement levels from your audiences.
- Understand your audience and what they are looking to see from you on social media. Use tools such as Facebook Ads Manager to create various ideal audience types that you can test your social media strategies on before committing your budget to paid social. Many experts suggest creating lookalike audiences, which target audience groups similar to your existing customers and allow you to test your campaign strategies with people who have not yet been familiarized with your business. Tools like this can also help you test your written and visual content with A/B testing.
- Utilize analytical tools to gain better insight into how your content is performing, who is looking at and engaging with your content the most, and how to continue optimizing your social media strategy and presence going forward.
- Marketing automation tools can greatly reduce the amount of time, effort, and money you’re investing in social media marketing. Simple tactics such as retargeting automation can send CTAs or give an extra push to consumers who may have reached a certain touchpoint (such as adding items to their cart) but have not carried through to converting. Using other marketing automation methods can help your business strategize your social strategy on a calendar and schedule content and campaigns in advance.
The most important concept to take away from all of this information is this: Don’t be afraid to get creative with how you decide to integrate your social media strategy into your marketing mix and find ways for your organic and paid social media methods to amplify each other.
Pairing the two social media marketing tactics can enable paid social to fill in gaps that organic reach may lack when it comes to reaching your target audience, while also building trust, engagement with people, and a community of followers through your organic posts. Now is the best time to get started with integrating organic social media into your marketing strategy to optimize your time, effort, money, and creativity!
