Organic and Paid Content Promotion

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

The difference between organic and paid content

Marketers need to understand the difference between organic and paid social support and when to use each.

Organic support is free. Organic content is useful for day-to-day updates, community engagement, and crowdsourcing ideas from social followers.
Paid content enables you to expand the reach of your messaging and your offers to precise audiences made up of people from your existing social following, as well as new audiences who may be interested in your offering.

Brand values

It's a good idea to share third-party content that reflects your brand values and demonstrates your company as an authority in your industry using organic posting to drive engagement.  

Some common examples of non-commercial values that companies share with their audience include: 

• Environmentalism
• Equality/diversity
• Ethics 
• Transparency

People like and do business with companies who believe in what they believe in. In other words, the business shares their own values. When you share content that appeals to the values of your customers and social audience, it will reflect more positively on your organization or brand as people feel that their values are the same as your values.

It's not common practice to promote third-party content using paid advertising. When it comes to paid content promotion, it is usually product- or brand-related, as we would like to see a direct or indirect commercial ROI for our efforts, as opposed to indirectly building the brand via organically curated third-party content.

Remarketing

Remarketing is a huge reason to use paid social ads. Audiences made up of people who have watched a previous social video all the way through, have interacted with your social pages, been to your website, or subscribed to a newsletter, for example, usually convert at a much higher rate than people who fit a demographic profile.

Therefore, the role of paid social is to drive the funnel. In short, you build top-of-funnel awareness through broad-reach ads, and then remarket to those who self-select by engaging or visiting your website.

Organic content, on the other hand, is preaching to the converted, deepening the relationship with your existing audience, and sometimes encouraging them to share out into their networks.

Where paid and organic intersect is with boosted content, which expands the reach of organic messaging.

Boosting organic posts

It’s important to mention that boosting organic posts, while an important part of raising the visibility of your social channels, needs to be done correctly. 

A common mistake is boosting posts that you suspect may struggle and need some support. This is usually a waste of money. Think of boosting as having a multiplying effect. However much you multiply zero, you still have zero. On the other hand, smart marketers keep an eye on their post metrics. And when a post seems to be gaining traction, they then boost it to a wider audience to multiply its natural effectiveness as a piece of engaging content.