No B2B company’s social media strategy is complete without both organic social posts—the free-to-post content that your team develops, either promoting your company’s offerings or industry news—and paid ads, which come with the “Sponsored” tag and are purely self-promotional. While implementing an organic social media marketing strategy may sound complicated enough, adding on the concept of paid ads may seem overwhelming. But trust us: once you supplement your organic posts with paid posts, your sales team and bottom line will benefit from the combination of marketing tools at your disposal.
It’s not about choosing organic vs. paid social media marketing; rather, how you can combine the two to create an effective, strong, and successful strategy. But when you put the two types of social media marketing together, you’ll want to avoid making errors that could alienate your audience. Read about how you can integrate paid and organic marketing to strengthen the success of your company’s social media strategy.
How to Avoid Social Media Marketing Mistakes
Prioritize Consistency ✨
One of the top tips for any B2B social media strategy is to stay consistent with your content. Every aspect of the post, from the imagery style to the call-to-action (CTA), should align with the tone of your brand and other posts. You should also keep your post timing consistent; if you post organically twice a week and run a paid ad once a month, stick to that schedule—always optimizing on what’s working.
Maintaining that consistent look and feel in both your organic and paid content will improve your audience’s experience. When your account’s post history feels cohesive, telling the same story about your brand, products, and services, you’ll see the best possible engagement.
Leverage Paid Social for Retargeting 🎯
Paid social is a fantastic tool to leverage within your B2B social media marketing strategy, and one of the best ways to retarget visitors who have already visited your website. Spending time and money converting previous page viewers is a better use of resources than blindly advertising to anyone.
Not only are retargeting campaigns lower in cost than traditional campaigns, but also more likely to succeed, because you’re only reaching out to people who are already familiar with your brand. These are people who have already viewed your page—maybe as a first step in their journey to make a purchase, or maybe they have already been perusing your products and services—and giving them a reminder to return to your site with the right ad can help close the deal.
Optimize Your Posts With A/B Testing 🧪
You may already be familiar with A/B testing from emails or subject lines: showing one message (A) to one group of your audience, and an alternate—typically similar, but distinct message (B)—to another group. In social media paid ads, using A/B tests on your posts can help you see which elements perform best. If you keep the ad exactly the same except for one specific element—the image, the headline, the CTA, or something else—you can examine the data to see which version performed best and use similar content going forward. Knowing which elements are most successful in your posts will help you craft future content to be more engaging, driving additional inbound traffic to your site.
You can even test it among the audience you’re targeting; A/B tests can be run by demographics like age and location, giving you even more insight into your market. Beyond that, organic posts can also be A/B tested; set up posts to be manually split, then track results after.
Boost Top-Performing Organic Content 💲
If you’ve created an organic post that’s doing well with your audience, build on that success by paying to boost the content. You can use specific targeting to extend your audience and to reach targets who otherwise wouldn’t have seen the post. Taking advantage of an existing post that performed exceptionally well is the easiest way to get started with paid advertising, plus it’s low risk—saving you money and time bypassing the need for a full ad campaign.
The way to tell if a post is performing well is to use your analytics report. If you just look at likes and comments, you’ll miss the big picture. You need to see conversions and profile views to know if a post resonated in a meaningful and successful way.
Combine Organic & Paid KPIs 📊
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are crucial for both your paid and organic social media content. When you look at all of your data to determine how effective a campaign was—including, but not limited to, total views, impressions, engagement, clicks, and sales made—you can gain insights into your brand as a whole. The way your paid and organic strategies work together determines your overall success in marketing on social media.
A common mistake is to keep the two strategies—paid and organic—separate when examining them. You’ll miss the big picture if you do that. The way they work together comprises their total impact, so make sure you’re analyzing everything to draw complete, accurate conclusions.
Use Paid Data to Optimize Organic Content… 📈
…and, use organic content to optimize paid data! It works both ways—you should be using each type of social content to help the other. If something is working for you in an organic post, look at how you can incorporate it into a paid post, and vice versa.
Essentially, use all the data you have from your posts, both paid and organic, to optimize the other type as well. Tracking things like page visits (and how they found you), post engagement metrics, and the demographics of your audience can help you decide what content you want to promote and what your target audience looks like on each platform.
Integrating Paid and Organic Social Media
Techniques for a strong organic and paid social media marketing strategy that leverages both types of posts are essential for your company in today’s digital age. Follow these steps—or reach out to marketing experts—to ensure your company doesn’t miss out on sales over your social media practices.
To accelerate your social media success, contact Sagefrog to build your organic and paid social media strategy. View our own social media accounts to see how we put our knowledge to work and learn more about our paid and organic social media services.
