Paid Social Basics??

Businesses can find success in using "free" or organic social marketing strategies, but oftentimes these strategies won't fulfill the goals of the business. This is where paid social strategies enter the picture. Utilizing organic social marketing and paid social marketing leads to long-term success and engagement with your brand and content.

Paid vs. Organic Social

Let's get into paid and organic social strategies! The benefits of each strategy vary, and many firms utilize both simultaneously. Before using either or both, it's important to understand the goals and strategy behind paid and organic social.

Organic social refers to free content that a business posts on their social media accounts. Such content can include photos, graphics, videos, memes, and more. When a business posts organically, this creates engagement with customers (and potential customers), brand awareness, and a community. Utilizing an organic social strategy creates a relationship with customers.

The goals of a firm's organic social strategy are to:

• create and establish the brand's personality and voice
• convert new customers and retain existing customers
• build relationships and engage with users by sharing content
• be of service to customers, providing customer service

Paid social is a form of paid advertising. In using this strategy, businesses pay social channels like Meta, LinkedIn, and YouTube to show their content to specified target audiences - those that likely will or already have interest in such content and brand. These targeted audiences are far more likely to engage with the brand and convert to customers. Paid advertisements can be "boosted" organic content or content designed to be an advertisement.

The goals of a firm's paid social strategy include:

• creating brand awareness
• attracting new followers
• promoting a new deal, piece of content, event, etc.
• generating leads and driving conversions

Organic and paid social strategies when applied correctly can complement each other and create successful results for your brand.

Types of Paid Social Audiences

When exploring the opportunities that a paid social strategy offers, you will have questions about finding your most profitable target audience. Understanding the types of paid social audiences is necessary in achieving your brand's goals. Let's take a look at how Meta offers three paid social audience selection tools for brands to use:

Core Audiences: This is where a firm can set rules on their ads based on their target market's location, demographics, interests, behavior, and connections. Using this tool can help direct a businesses ad to potential customers based on the aforementioned criteria rules.

Custom Audiences: This tool allows a firm to connect with Meta users that have already shown interest in the brand - whether these users are loyal customers or are users that have visited the firm's website. With the Custom Audiences tool, a firm can use their contact lists, site visitors, and app users to get a boost in engagement with this type of audience.

Lookalike Audiences: This is an effective tool that connects a firm's ad to users that are similar to their current customer base. To use this tool, a firm needs to create a source audience of current customers. Doing this will help a firm reach users with common interests.

Using the Core, Custom, and Lookalike Audience tools can increase engagement and connect you to the right customers.

Influencer Marketing Basics

Did you know that influencer marketing is highly profitable? In 2020, for every $1 a brand spent on influencer marketing, the brand would make an average of $5.78. Let's get into what influencer marketing is and how marketers can track its effectiveness.

Influencer marketing is a paid social media marketing strategy that entails content creators' (those who are in a position to influence consumer behavior) making product endorsements and placing products in their content. The goal of influencer marketing is to use those that have influence on their audience and can persuade them to try the advertised product and make it trendy.

In 2021, 65% of brands were concerned on how to track ROI on their influencer marketing tactics. Here are a few ways to track your influencer marketing tactics:

• Set goals: To understand the success of your influencer marketing campaign, you must have goals set for clicks on website, impressions, and engagement. Look at current metrics and create quantifiable goals for your campaign.
• Track impressions and engagement: Impressions equate to how many users have viewed your content, whereas engagement equates to likes, shares, and comments on your content. Note what has worked and what hasn't. This will relate to your campaign launch goals.
• Measure traffic before and after marketing campaign: Take notes on spikes and dips in engagement and impressions on your your social media platforms before and after launching an influencer campaign. If the engagement and purchases on your site and media platforms increases during the campaign launch, this is a positive sign that it is successful.
• Determine KPI's: A KPI is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively your company is achieving your business objectives. Consider the goals that your firm has in this process.
• Utilize promo codes and affiliate links: Creating discount promo codes and affiliate links for individual influencers that incentive their followers to try the product are a way to track sales that are tied to influencers. This is a direct way to see the impact of influencer marketing on your brand.

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