How to Create a Paid Social Media Strategy

Everyone uses social media. From people in their fifties to kids who just turned 13, the amount of time spent on social media has never been higher. Statista found that people spent an average of 2 hours and 27 minutes on social media every day last year! That is almost 900 hours a year. All this time leads to an incredible amount of potential views on your business. Let’s see how you can utilize social media to grow your business.

Organic

Organic social media is a simple concept, with a business creating an account and posting something like any other user. A company posting a picture, video, text, or anything else they do on the platform without spending money on advertising all fall into the organic category.

Generally, there are a few goals for an organic social media strategy. Since most people your organic posts reach are already followers, content needs to be made specifically for them. This means that they probably know what your brand is already, so focus on telling them who your brand is instead. Creating a voice and personality for your online brand is vital for this. Other big goals to focus on are creating a good customer service reputation and further building relationships with consumers. These goals don’t sound difficult, but if you just blindly post stuff, your page isn’t going anywhere. Strategy is the name of the game.

Strategy in social media marketing starts where most marketing strategies start: segmentation. Creating a customer persona for different types of users that engage with your social media content will help to target posts effectively. It is a lot easier to build a relationship with users if you know who they are. A/B testing is another popular strategy for organic social media. Social media is actually one of the easiest platforms to track how what is working best. Did Post A receive three times as much engagement as Post B? Well, then your next post should be a little more like Post A! The best strategy is to create content with a specific customer persona in mind. Thinking about who is going to engage with your finished content will make the overall process smoother, quicker, and more effective.

Paid

Paid social media involves paying money to the platform to show your content to more people. When promoting your content, you can choose who to promote it to. This includes options like demographics, interests, and connections to other users.

The goals of paid media are a little different than organic. Rather than continuing to build a relationship with current customers, a paid strategy focuses on finding new customers. Paid media also has the benefit of targeting a very specific audience, so content can be tailored to those audiences better. Specific goals depend on the industry your business is in, but the main goals are aspects like direct sales, sign-ups, or even just followers. Paid media focuses on converting new customers and pushing them further through the funnel.

One of the best ways to find which post to promote using a paid strategy is to see which organic post does the best. If you notice that an organic post is doing better than usual, it might be good to pay to show it to more people. Paid media also works a lot faster than organic media. If you need results now, paid is the best way to achieve that.

Paid VS Organic:

There are a lot of similarities between the two types of media strategy, but there are also unique benefits to each. Take a look at the Venn diagram below to help you understand their relationship.

Different Audiences

Targeting the right segment is important to maximize the effectiveness of your paid media. Popularized by Meta, there are now 3 main audiences that are available to target. Core, custom, and lookalike.

Core:

Targeting a core audience allows you to select different demographic and psychographic information as requirements to be shown your ad. Some of these variables include age, location, gender, interests, and attitudes.?

Custom:

Targeting a custom audience allows you to target people who have already shown an interest in your business. Using data from across Meta platforms, you are able to specifically target users who viewed a certain product, downloaded your app, or shopped at an in-store location.

Lookalike:

Lookalike audiences allow you to target people who have a very similar profile to customers you already have. Given a list of current customers, it will target new people who have similar interests and traits to your current customers. These people are statistically likely to also have an interest in your business.

Influencer marketing

Another popular social media strategy is influencer marketing. This strategy utilizes paying influencers to market your company using their own followers. This generally works better than regular paid strategies for a few reasons. Mainly, influencers have a lot of influence (shocker, I know). The people who follow them take their word very seriously and trust what the influencer says. The way the ads are delivered is also less intrusive which leads to more attention. The ROI on influencer marketing can be huge, with some seeing a $5.78 return for every dollar spent.?

The type of influencer has a large impact on how much it will cost and how effective it will be. Influencer size ranges from nano-influencers with ~1000 followers to mega influencers with over a million. Generally, the bigger the influencer, the more it will cost. However bigger influencers reach larger audiences so it is up to you to decide how much you are willing to spend. The more important part of selecting an influencer is finding one that shares a similar audience to your target market. Reaching millions of people is useless if they won’t care about your product. Most influencers will have a good idea of who their audience is, so don’t be afraid to ask. They want a partnership just as much as you do.

Tracking how well your influencer strategy works isn’t as easy as tracking one of your own paid posts, but there are still effective ways to check. Using a specific link or discount code associated with the influencer is a good way to measure direct contributions. Often times influencers are asked to provide feedback on how well the sponsorship went as well.

The best advice is to start small. It is difficult to predict how well any given paid marketing campaign will perform. Starting small, analyzing results, and choosing the best-performing campaign to put more money towards is a great way of maximizing ROI. Social media strategy is one of the fastest-growing areas of marketing, and it is vital for your brand to remain relevant in this online world.