Social media is one of the most powerful marketing channels available today. I will discuss the key differences between organic and paid social media, how to use audience targeting tools effectively, and what the influencer marketing industry is all about. Whether you are someone just starting out with paid social media, or you are looking to improve your current social media strategy, understanding these three concepts will help you reach the right people with the right message.
Organic Vs. Paid Social Media
How They are Similar & Different
Starting off with organic social media, it focuses on the middle to lower funnel of your buyer’s journey. The main goal is to increase followers who actively engage with your brand, which means these followers already know who you are. One important part of organic social media is that organic posts are usually only seen by people who already follow you, and only a small percentage of these followers will actually see the post. We can use tools like boosted posts to extend our reach, which is like how paid social media works.
On the other hand, paid social media targets to the top of the funnel. Paid social media strategies are about delivering the right message to the right audience on the right platform. This is relatively easy to do because social media platforms collect massive amounts of data and provide analytical tools (such as audience tools) that let you reach specific audiences efficiently.
How to use Paid Social Media
First off, we must understand how to use Google Analytics to understand the basic demographics of our website visitors. We should also launch organic content on our social media platforms to figure out what type of content drives engagement and conversions. Also, we should research what platforms our competitors are using for both their paid and organic strategies to see what type of content is successful.
Next, we create different content and campaigns based on the three segments in the buyer’s journey, while making our content look and feel consistent across all of the segments. First, we have prospecting, which targets people at the top of the funnel who have never heard of you. The goal is to increase brand awareness, so the messaging should focus on our potential customers and their needs and problems. Next, we have retargeting, which focuses on the middle funnel, where these people have engaged with our brand but have yet to buy anything from us. We tried to encourage them to consider our brand by focusing on the benefits we provide, and our goal is to increase engagement and click-through rates on our website. Third, we have remarketing, which targets the bottom of the funnel. These are the people who have already purchased our product, and we can encourage repeat purchases by focusing our messaging on the reasons why we are better than our competitors.
Paid social media is similar to paid search and programmatic advertising because it operates on a pay-per-click model. You only pay when people actually click on your ad, which means you get tons of free impressions. You can use demographic filters provided by social media platforms to target specific segments. These social media platforms have tons of data that allows you to create efficient and specific targeting campaigns based on location, interest, demographics, and job title.
How to Use Social Media Audience Tools
What are Social Media Audience Tools?
Social media audience tools are created by Meta and other social media platforms to help marketers segment audiences to reach as many people as possible. By gathering information on potential customers who are not following your brand, you can segment them and find lookalike users on social media platforms.
“New” Audiences
New audiences are people who do not know about your brand and have not seen your content. This approach guarantees an exact number of impressions, which is unlike traditional commercial advertising, where you may think you know the audience. Paid social media lets you know exactly who your audience is, and specifically how many people are interested.
“Custom” Audiences
Custom audiences are people who have shown interest in your brand, but do not follow you. This tool helps you connect with people who have purchased your products, previously given you their email address, or visited your website. If you have an email list from your newsletters. You can connect it with the social media user database to find their profiles and serve them paid ads.
“Lookalike” Audiences (The Most Important)
Lookalike Audiences are one of the most important audience tools. By using your custom audiences as a source, social media platforms will find users who resemble these custom audiences. For example, a marketer can create a custom audience of website visitors, then create a lookalike audience that targets social media users like these website visitors. This is a great and efficient way to expand your potential customer reach. Look-alike audiences are especially valuable for reaching people who don’t engage with much media outside of social media, and don’t give away their emails too often.
Influencer Marketing & Why It Is Important
Why You Should Work with Influencers
Most people under 35 follow social media influencers, which gives these creators access to huge audiences. According to the Digital Marketing Institute, influencer marketing helps you gain reach in a targeted audience or niche and can drive campaign performance, whether you’re increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or boosting sales.
According to the 2024 influencer marketing report from Sprout Social, half of all consumers make purchases based on influencer posts once a month, and 86% of consumers make a purchase inspired by an influencer at least once a year. These brands that work with influencers create larger audiences while benefiting from the trust the influencers have built with their followers.
People tend to follow influencers because they like their personality. They share experiences and opinions with the influencer that make them feel relatable, which creates a perceived trustworthiness from the followers to the influencers. When influencers promote a product, their followers will see this recommendation as trustworthy and credible, even if they know the influencer is getting paid for this. The credibility often comes from the influencers’ less professional content compared to brand-created content, which feels more genuine to consumers. Using influencers to promote your brand and products leads to higher conversion rates and better ROI.
On average, ROI for influencer marketing tends to make $6.50 on every dollar invested in influencer marketing. According to McKinsey, the global influencer marketing economy in 2023 was roughly $21.1 billion, with an estimated compound annual growth rate of 11.1%. This should make it obvious that the influencer marketing economy is a huge resource to tap into.
Types Of Influencers
First, we have nano influencers, who have under 10,000 followers. This small follower count is actually a plus because they appear more approachable and spend more time engaging with their followers, which leads to higher engagement levels. Nano influencers are also great for small businesses. While their overall reach is low, their reach within local communities can be significant.
Next, we have micro influencers, who have between 10,000 and 50,000 followers. They are also seen as more approachable due to their follower count. When big brands use micro influencers, their content seems less like an ad in more genuine. Micro influencers can often be paid in product.
We also have medium influencers, who have between 50,000 and 100,000 followers. ROI for medium influencers is usually the highest and can potentially reach an ROI of 20. Medium influencers typically create content for about $50 a post (or sometimes even in free product), which can generate an average of $1000 in revenue.
Finally, we have macro influencers (between 100,000 and 1,000,000 followers) and mega influencers (1,000,000+ followers). While you would receive lots of awareness and tons of people would see this content, working with these types of influencers is often extremely expensive, and is often seen as less genuine to our consumers and their followers.
Wrapping Up
To achieve success in social media marketing, you require the use of both organic and paid strategies. Your social media efforts should also be integrated within your overall digital marketing strategies, rather than existing separately. By understanding how audience targeting tools work and leveraging the power of influencer marketing, marketers can create campaigns that effectively reach new customers (awareness) and retarget existing customers (consideration & decision). When starting in paid social media, start small, track your results, and scale what works.