What type of social media marketing should I choose? Organic or paid

Hubspot, one of the most popular websites on Digital marketing has recently conducted a survey on social media marketing entrepreneurs and has published its results: 63 percent of the companies who are using social media have said that it has increased marketing effectiveness among other benefits. There is no doubt today, that using the social media definitely contributes to an improved digital marketing. But the leverage lies in doing it correctly. In this context, people are often confused between the two kinds of social media marketing: the paid form or the unpaid form. The latter is often called the organic form. First, it is important to understand each of these forms correctly.

The salient features of Organic social media marketing are:

1. You do not pay the social media network

2. You will have a web page for your company in that particular media network.

• Your social media presence is assured; but your social media popularity will depend on your content quality, interaction and relationship building capability and your capability to tackle multiple leads simultaneously.

1. It is content driven just like organic SEO

2. Engaging, informative, relevant, non-repetitive posts, visuals like image, video storytelling may help to build contents that bring in quality web traffics.

The salient features of paid social media marketing are:

1. It is form of paid advertisements that will appear on your selected social media network as sponsored ads.

2. It is just like paid SEM.

• Your visibility or ad impression is assured.

1. Your targets will be more focused.

2. To drive in a click, text ads as well as the display needs to look appealing. It should be able to seek attention of the social media

3. Strategies need to be built so that a large percentage of your Click rate actually converts into customers. This needs to be checked frequently; otherwise you might end up spending on some ads which does not yield benefits. Optimization techniques with continuous monitoring of the ad performance need to be done.

Now the question is how to choose between these two forms. Following are the controlling factors:

1. Your immediate purpose to be on the social media If it is to build better customer experience, the organic form will be a cost effective approach.

2. Do you need to achieve any immediate business targets through this social media platform? For example, your current target is to generate 15 leads in 30 days’ time. In that case, an immediate visibility is required. The paid form of social media marketing should be advisable in this aspect. Giving an ad does not mean that it will surely generate web traffic. You need work on your resources and ad appeal for that. But a paid ad, definitely improves the chance of being visited.

• Your budget is another controlling factor in this aspect.

1. The industry sector you are dealing with is also an important factor.

Some prefer to improve their visibility with paid marketing in the initial stages. Then they switch to the organic form 

THANKS

T10T