Organic strategies are a slow burn approach to building loyalty over time with valuable, reusable content.
Paid strategies are more about throwing money at something that targets the perfect audience to buy whatever you are selling.
Over my career I’ve had a solid 10 years learning about organic community building via social media and content. Other people I worked with would specialize in paid strategies. The company combined these efforts to sell the product and then retain their users.
There is sometimes debate about whether organic or paid is better.
There’s no one size fits all answer, it all depends on what you are trying to do.
Organic marketing relies on SEO & algorithms to build an audience over time
Organic content tends to be client-centric and focused on engaging your community.
Marketers use the term organic because the goal is to rely on search engines and other algorithms to push your content to an audience. The content needs to be optimized for the platform it’s being produced for in order to be effective. When it comes to organic content, SEO driven website content is far more profitable than social media posts.
Organic social media still has its role to play.
On social media you are using organic to keep your brand in the minds of people. If you are a restaurant you will post menu items. As a musician you post song snippets. Fashion companies show off models wearing their clothes. While it’s about sales, this becomes a long term play.
It takes something like 7 times for someone to see an ad and decide to buy.
Organic social media not only keeps your brand in mind, it is a valuable tool for discovering who your audience is. It provides your existing audience a reason to stay. Also, most paid tools let you target anyone who visited your page, this means building a solid organic strategy can lead to a better paid strategy.
I like to think of organic as a way to get to know who you want to pitch your paid services to.
Organic does not actually mean free
Before moving on to paid we need to address the elephant in the room.
Organic does not mean free. It simply means the absence of a budget used to push the content via paid advertisement tools. There is definitely a cost to organic.
You will need to think about who creates the content.
While organic content pieces tend to be cheaper to produce, you need a lot more of them. Your strategy will rely on regular content production and a set schedule. The algorithms appreciate consistency.
The people you work with will also need to be good at content. When dealing with organic, whatever you post has to be engaging. You are relying on people seeing the content and interacting with it.
Organic efforts are more about feedback than sales. While you can use organic to sell, and you should, the real ROI comes from finding out what people are motivated by.
The content you create that performs, and leads to actionable feedback in the comment sections, will help you design future products/services with your clients in mind.
Plus the more you know about your client the more specific you can target them.
Paid marketing relies on targeted ads to generate faster conversions
Once you know who your client is, and they have told you what they are willing to pay for, it’s time to think about paid strategies.
The way it works with paid is you take a single content piece, and you spend a bunch of money to put it in front of people, now. You define your target audience, then you set a budget and length of the campaign. When people buy more than you spent, you have a successful campaign.
Paid marketing should be reserved for two main things.
Selling something directly.
Lead list building for a service
If you put 100$ into an ad and sell 1000$ worth of product, it’s clearly a good move. While organic strategies would have introduced your product to people, the paid ad tools let you show it to people who are more likely to buy from you.
The better you know the psychology of your client, the more you can filter who sees the ads.
With that in mind, you can also create a post that captures leads. I often get targeted by fitness coaches offering me a free 7 week workout. They know for every 10 people that sign up, they will sell X.
This ad builds a qualified lead list.
Paid marketing uses a couple of well produced content pieces to sell over and over again.
Virality doesn’t pay the same as targeted ads or the slow drip of organic
People love virality because there are a lot of numbers.
In the world of content and music, virality is amazing. It’s the result of people liking what you produce. The more shareable it is, the higher values you are.
In the world of retail/specialized services, virality often means reaching an audience outside your target.
As an example, viral posts for a local food marketing page actually hurt the stats. The value comes from local viewership. Getting 50’000 views from another country isn’t a compelling thing if none of those people will ever buy.
To measure the success of organic content it’s about averages.
If the average goes up over time, you are growing your community. You can use signals like comments and shares to measure growth, but it’s going to be the averages that let you know how strong your community is.
Consistently pulling 2000 views on Reels with 50 likes and 50 comments is worth more in a lot of ways than getting 50’000 views on 3 Reels but 500 views on the rest of your Reels.
The reason the averages matter is because you can’t predict viral, but you can sell people based on your averages.
The question remains, should you use organic or paid?
Organic and paid strategies can work well together
The symbiosis of organic and paid working together is the ideal situation.
Paid content is an advertisement. It will get a lot of eyes on what you are doing. It should be used to sell directly.
Organic content is your glue. It feeds your community and when you do advertise, shows the people checking you out that you are a legitimate contender. No one likes seeing a paid ad and going to a crusty, unprepared website.
Sometimes the ROI for organic can only be measured in its ability to help convert paid content.
Usually the goal of paid content is to create a clear ad. Although, you can see that companies are making fake organic content to use as ads, they are still content blocked like an ad.
Organic is also used to sell, let’s not get anything twisted. A proper keyword stuffed blog drawing specialized organic search traffic will make you some stacks. When you later vet the content, you can turn the best performing ones into even higher value content to use as specialized paid content.
Everything is case by case, but you should probably start with organic until you know what you are selling to people. Then hit them with the paid. If you already know who you are selling to and have the means to throw some money, skip the organic and go straight paid.
Just don’t use paid for “brand awareness”. That is a big ol’ waste.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
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