Comparing impacts & advantages of paid vs. organic social media strategies

Influencer Marketing beyond Social Media

When developing social media marketing strategies, it’s so important to get the mix right – and prioritise the right tactics. You need to make the right decisions, and squeeze every drop of impact and value from your efforts.

One of the toughest decisions to make is whether to focus on paid or organic social media strategies. Or should you try a blend of both? And what’s the ideal ratio of paid vs. organic?

If these are the kinds of questions keeping you up at night, read on. We’ll explore the impacts and advantages of both paid and organic social media strategies below, to help you fine-tune your plans.

Understanding Paid vs Organic Social Media

Firstly, it’s useful to run through a quick definition of each term, so you understand exactly what techniques you’re working with.

Paid social media essentially refers to ads or sponsored campaigns designed to reach a target audience on a particular platform. These are usually targeted towards specific audience demographics, using the platform’s tools to hone in on users’ interests, behaviours, searches – as well as demographics such as age, gender and geographical location.

Organic social media involves creating high quality content that isn’t backed by a paid campaign. Marketers will use the standard content tools on the platform to create posts, videos, stories and reels which rely on engagement – especially the sharing of content by other users.

Impacts and advantages of paid social media

One of the biggest advantages of paid social media marketing is targeting. You can focus on selling or promoting products/services to customers who are most likely to buy. This might be because they fit your ideal customer profile, or it may be down to geographical location or the customer’s own interests and behaviours.

Crucially, paid social allows you to reach people who aren’t currently following your brand. It’s fast and effective at improving both reach and engagement to a larger audience, compared to organic social media marketing which can take time.

Another benefit is the opportunity to measure the success of paid campaigns, as social platforms offer detailed analytics tools. This means you can tweak future campaigns based on what has and hasn’t worked so far.

Impacts and advantages of organic social media

The most obvious advantage of organic social media is that it’s much cheaper, at least in terms of financial investment. Paid social can be expensive, whereas organic marketing requires no upfront spend. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that it does require a substantial investment in time – both in terms of time to plan campaigns and create content, and to let your follower numbers grow.

But get it right, and you can reach a significant audience for very little budget. It lets you build and nurture strong relationships with an engaged audience. This establishes loyalty, and helps to develop a community around your brand. Digital communities can be extremely powerful, and turn members of this community into brand advocates. They’ll do the work that paid social does, spreading the word to people who don’t already follow you.

Organic social media also lets you have a little fun, showcasing your brand’s personality and culture. There are so many creative ways to generate content, including making use of user-generated content.

Combining paid and organic social media

Most seasoned social media marketers would agree that a blend of both paid and organic is the way forward. You can find the right balance based on your budget, focusing more on organic content and a small amount of highly targeted paid social media if money is tight.

It takes time to find the right mix of tactics for your brand, and you may want to prioritise either paid or social based on particular campaigns too. But this is why social media analytics data is so useful – it can tell you exactly what is having the most impact.

Real world impact

If you’re working on your very first social campaigns, it can be useful to take a look at some real-world examples. Below, we’ll run through some case studies demonstrating the effectiveness of both organic and paid social strategies – starting with one which blended the two to perfection.

Paid Social – Kandoo

First up, it’s Kandoo Kids, specialists in potty training products and resources with a presence in 8 countries worldwide. The company aimed to grow brand awareness through engaging their target audience (parents with younger children) on social media.

Click Consult developed monthly social media strategies for the brand, using a blend of paid and organic content. A wide variety of assets was used, in multiple languages – with input from community managers in Kandoo Belgium, Portugal and other countries to ensure the messaging was 100% right for each local market.

Ultimately, the strategy led to a huge 7.4m+ impressions for the brand, along with 10,200+ engagements and nearly 5,000 clicks through to the Kandoo website.

Read more about our Kandoo organic and paid social strategy here.

Organic social – PrecisionBiotics

Click Consult’s strategy for microbiome supplements specialist PrecisionBiotics was more focused on organic rather than paid social media.

Newcomers to the B2C market, PrecisionBiotics wanted to boost brand awareness organically. The priority was to encourage ‘quality’ engagements with the right people, rather than quantity – so organic was a better fit than social.

Working with the brand’s target customer profiles, Click Consult developed authentic relationships with influencers within the wellness and gut health industry. This led to greater visibility of the company’s brand name outside of its own followers, and linked it to successful brands in a similar niche.

Within just 5 months, we increased the brand’s post and profile impressions across Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. Plus, the post engagement rate shot up by 79% (Instagram) and post reach increased by a huge 163% (Facebook).

Read more about our work with PrecisionBiotics here.