How Organic Social Plays Into Paid Social

HELLO THERE, YOU!

Happy belated Valentine’s Day. I appreciate each of you who take some time to read these as we get the ball rollin’. I hope you ate some good food, relaxed, and were surrounded by people ya love.

I spent mine hand-delivering pizza pies in costume for Graza and then ordering in a feast from Westville. Also, someone literally gave us a whole bouquet for giving them a pizza and I literally cried in a random person’s stairwell because like how cute is that?!?

Just a nice reminder that it costs nothing to be a great person.

Anyway, back to the kale salad from Westville. It’s literally one of the best in the city. Also, I will die on the hill that the best girl dinner is a huge salad and a side of fries with a crisp Diet Coke.

I just woke up and am cozying up with a homemade latte, in head to toe sweats, knuckles cracked, staring at my new tattoo to talk about how organic social plays into your paid social media strategy.

Let’s get rock and rolling. We’re going to pretend like we are tackling some levels to breaking this all down.

• Level 1: What is the Difference between Paid Media and Organic Social Media?

• Level 2: Why Paid Creative and Organic Social Creative Is Going To Look Different Sometimes

• Level 3: How Organic Social Plays Into Paid Social

What Is The Difference Between Paid Media and Organic Social Media?

Let’s cut to the chase: It’s not organic vs. paid social media—it’s organic AND paid social media. A hybrid paid and organic social media strategy provides brands with the best of both worlds. You build a community online that you put in the work to build through creative content WHILE being able to put money behind those best performers to help expand your community to specifics niches, demographics, and more.

If you’re just getting started in the world of social media or marketing, let’s have a quick rundown of what paid media is and organic.

• Paid Social Media: When you are spending money behind the creative to gain more reach with the goal of brand awareness and ultimately, conversion.

  • It supports better targeting initiatives. This allows you to reach relevant prospects based on their activity, location, age and so on. An example here would be to help target and segment for a retail initiative that might only be in a specific state or region of the country.

  • It helps boosts and elevate your lead generation. If you have a strong piece of content, a paid campaign helps ensure that it doesn’t go unseen and that it can be optimized accordingly.

  • If organic social is a marathon, paid social is a sprint. A single, well-targeted campaign can bring a ton of new audience members (note: remember that community and audience is different) to your respective social profiles.

• Organic Social Media: Organic social media is any post shared for free without any money spent to increase reach or conversions across platforms like Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter (refuse to call it X), and more. You are using our creative resources and mediums to give broader awareness about the brand, campaign, or specific product with a goal to educate, entertain, and retain. It is a platform for storytelling rather than selling.

  Both of these mediums can still leverage similar content that would live respectively on both brand channels, be optimized accordingly, bring in new eyes, which is why you can use your organic social media to highlight and forecast what may work for your paid social media efforts.

  See where I am going with this?

  For example, if you’re a brand, you might have the following running across your organic and paid media:

  • User or Employee Generated Content: Unboxings of Your Product, Reviews of Your Product

  • Static Posts: New Products Announcements, Product Shots

  • Video: How To Use The Product, Highlighting a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) of Your Product, Answering FAQs

  • Influencer Support via Collaborative Posts (on organic) and then leveraging whitelisting for paid media initiatives

How and Where Do They Work Together?

Some people like to say that brand and performance marketing exist in different buckets, but in my opinion, the best social teams are run by those who understand brand AND performance marketing.

Why?

Your best organic creative can become your greatest paid asset.

How?

You can test your top performers on organic for retargeting or brand awareness campaigns on Meta or Tiktok, for example, but it’s something that needs to remain front of mind of your organic social team as well since they are the ones who have to communicate their thoughts and feelings to the broader team about why they think that piece of creative is worth a test.

Why Does Paid Creative and Organic Social Creative Going To Look Different Sometimes and Why Is That Okay?

When it comes to paid media, we are constantly have to tell people WHY us and as fast as we can and in a way that makes them stop scrolling. After all, the best ads don’t feel like ads.

Ya know, just another reason why you should test organic creative.

On paid, you might currently focus more on the value propositions of your brand rather than the actual outcome you want from the POV of your consumer.

For example, if you’re a better-for-you online grocery store or marketplace, if you focusing on just the value propositions, you creative may just keep pushing the notions that you could be you have a healthier choice for a better price, you learn more about what’s in your food and in your pantry rather than the the free XYZ gifts you get, the trial periods you offer for them to learn about the above.

We all know the phrase that if you try and talk to everyone, you talk to no one and man is that true on both sides of paid and organic, but even more so with paid. Yes, you can use creators in specific niches to help you dive into a new demographic on organic social media or create specific content around an initiative, but on paid you can truly get as granular or as broad as you want as well.

In my opinion (also please note: I do not do media buying and this is all just from working with a ton of awesome teams), you can have so much fun in the niches on the paid media front when you offer such a broad product like a healthy marketplace for snacks.

• Is the consumer a stay at home mom who wants healthier snacks for her kids?

• Are they a college student or young adult who wants healthy choices, but is only surrounded by big name grocers with an agenda?

• Are they busy professionals that literally have no time to cook or leave for a nice walk around the grocery store?

• Do they want to eat healthier, but simply do not know what brands are the “healthy alternative?”

Paid media creative should follow the formula of: Value Props (what brands think is cool) → The Customer (the judge) → Outcomes (what consumers think are cool)

Now a quick note about organic social.

We need to admit is that organic social should not be looked at or treated as a conversion-first tool. This is usually why social teams aren’t given the budgets they need or the channels are given the focus they deserve when in reality it’s your modern-day business card.

This is where we should want to attract people in with something they can relate to or feel like they took away something valuable. Value can look different to everyone. It can be that they laughed and look at your brand for a source of entertainment. It can be that they learned something new and look to your brand as a source of education.

No consumer is going to say “I just love being sold to from this Instagram account”.

Of course, rules still apply similar to paid of how can you make someone stop scrolling to capture attention. You goal should always be to say “What is the outcome we want the consumer to get out of this and what does the consumer actually want vs. what do we want to create?”

The Ultimate Marriage of Organic and Paid Social

Ok, now that you have the gist. Let’s quickly hit on how you make the two work for you brand and how you can take this email to hit the ground running immediately.

In short, your organic social channels should be seen as your “testing ground” where you can try different formats and concepts cheaply before deciding to run paid media spend behind them or investing in any way.

Paid is expensive.

We love saving money.

So, testing 20-30 concepts on organic social FIRST before deciding to chuck thousands at Mark Zuckerberg seems like a better concept.

The steps of success here are simply:

1. Use your organic channels to test and learn.

2. Use paid media to promote your top performing posts and turn them into ads. Also, this doesn’t mean just hitting the “BOOST” button on your Instagram account.

Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are great places to test creative.

Why?

If it outperforms the baseline of views/engagement you normally get, you can immediately ship it to paid since the proof is in the pudding. Here’s an example from Canopy that I made that was shipped to paid and one similarly here for Graza.

The outcome? You could walk away with a beautiful return on your ad spend, increased CTR, and more.

Think of posting on the short-form platforms as your first few hundred dollars in ad budget, where you can test and see if it resonates. If it doesn’t perform then why are you going to invest dollars in that don’t make any sense when you can use that budget to either back performing creative or to help in organic efforts to keep producing more original content.

That’s a helluva lot of information.

Quickly, let’s hop into..

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THAT’S ALL FOLKS

That closes down this edition of No Filter. Thanks for listening and reading and as always if you ever have a question, just hit me up by pressing the “Reply” button or dm’ing me on Twitter!

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I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and enjoy the long weekend!

TTYL BESTIES

-kd