You work several hours to plan, create and design content for your brand. However, when it comes to promotion, you are not getting the desired results and are left feeling confused. Well, one typical reason for this could be that you are weighing your options between organic and paid marketing. Though organic and paid advertising are two different methods for increasing leads and growing business, it’s important that you successfully integrate them both into your business. You need to create a strategy where both work in tandem to deliver great results. Organic marketing refers to the content you post on your social media page or website that is shown to your current page followers, hashtags followers or by your follower’s followers. It is pretty simple and the best way to foster a connection with your audience at scale. Most brands use organic advertising to nurture their relationship with their audience, to engage consumers at every stage of their buying journey and to support them with customer service.

On the other hand, paid marketing, or inorganic marketing, is when you pay money to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google or any other media platform with the aim of reaching more customers, either through designing distinct collaterals or boosting your organic content. Most of the brands make use of paid marketing to increase brand awareness, attract new followers, promote their new deal or content, generate leads and drive conversions.

Though both of these methods have their own perks, it can take time for you to achieve your business goals using organic ways. Meanwhile, with a paid process you can attract leads and drive conversions comparatively faster. So, what you can do is use organic ads to serve and engage your existing customers while attracting new ones with paid ads.

Boost The Best Organic Content

One way to integrate both organic and paid efforts into your marketing strategy is by boosting your best organic content. It is probably the simplest way to enter the world of media buying. Here, the risk involved is low as you are using content that has already created an impact. This is typically considered an entry-level tactic as you don’t have to come up with an ad campaign. For instance, you can make use of Instagram’s ‘promoted posts’ to boost the reach of your best organic posts. However, each social media channel feature a paid platform that accommodates for better targeting and even lets you measure the results.

Lookalike Campaigns

The more social media presence you have grown organically, the more information you may have collected related to your ideal customer. What are they interested in? What problems do they face? What kind of content they engage with? How are you, as a brand, helping them? Make use of all this information as you build your campaign. Plan and design ads according to the content they would like and target your ads towards the audience you think would be interested and perhaps take action. For instance, most social media channels allow you to create lookalike audiences based on your best prospects, as you describe them. These prospects could be the people you have engaged with, your newsletter subscribers or someone who has brought your product or undertaken your service. Typically, a lookalike audience comprises people with similar behaviour and demographics who have yet not been introduced to your brand.

Retargeting Campaigns

In a retargeting campaign, you use paid ads to target audience who have already visited your social media profiles or your website. It is useful to remind these people about your products and services after they leave your website without buying anything. For most people, it is important that they know a brand before they decide to make a purchase. With a retargeting campaign, you can place your brand at the top of your potential customers’ minds who were not ready to buy when they first visited your website. Basically, retargeting helps you to increase brand visibility, build brand awareness and reach people that have already shown interest in your product/service. It can be done with on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google and other platforms that support media buying.

Measure Your Results

Getting your organic or paid marketing right takes is initially trial and error. Therefore, it is important that you try out different strategies, measure their results and tweak your approach until you figure out what works. With time, you will be able to figure out which posts resonate with your audience and creates the desired impact. Then, you can make use of this analytical data while designing your creatives and running campaigns. Make use of different social analytical tools to monitor and figure out what works and what doesn’t and use this data to improve both the marketing methods and consequently, to get better results.

At the end of the day, your marketing efforts can’t thrive alone on paid or organic methods. The best solution is to amalgamate the two. To achieve your marketing ROI, first build your brand by creating and promoting relevant content organically and then make use of paid channels to get optimal results faster.