If you’ve ever ventured into the world of digital marketing, you’ve probably heard the terms “paid” and “organic” in regards to marketing, reach, and advertising. There are countless articles and studies about digital marketing, and most of them touch on paid vs. organic and why you need one or the other. The truth is that you need both in order to really grow your business and get in front of new audiences.
Digital marketing is all about using online platforms to connect with and expand your audience, drive revenue, spread brand awareness, and ultimately grow your business. Paid and organic ads and posts are both great for working toward that common goal of growth. However, they go about it in two different ways. Paid reach refers to the number of people who see your content from paid promotions on social media, and organic reach refers to the number of people who see your content on social media without paid promotions. Both have awesome benefits, and we wanted to dive into what those are and how you can make the most of them.
Paid Promotions on Social
Social media paid promotions can be counterproductive if they’re done wrong. You can spend all the time in the world creating visually stunning posts, engaging videos, and perfect advertisements, but you won’t see the conversion you need if you don’t know or target your desired audience.
When you’re starting out with digital marketing, the first thing you’ll need to do is find your demographic. If you have a product or service that is primarily for middle-aged parents, you wouldn’t spend all of your precious time trying to build up a presence on Tik Tok because that’s not where your audience is. And if you have a product or service specifically for young adults and teenagers, you wouldn’t spend all of your time and money marketing on Facebook. Once you’ve narrowed down your target audience, you’ll be able to create content that will resonate specifically with them and start promoting your posts.
When you’re creating a promoted post, you’ll want to keep your audience in mind, but also recognize that this post is going to find people who have likely never heard of you. What message do you want to send? What products or services are you selling? Asking yourself questions like these will help you create the best content for the situation, and your target audience will respond to it positively. Another great thing about running a paid promotion is that you can choose the audience that fits best for your demographic. If paid promotions just showed up for random people, they wouldn’t be effective. The reason paid marketing works so well is that you can set a specific target audience (age, gender, location, etc.) and your post will show up for those people.
Organic Reach on Social
Organic reach on social media is the second piece of digital marketing that you’ll need to create a genuine online presence with a loyal following. Thousands upon thousands of people post on social media every single day. It’s impossible to see every post from every person, so social media platforms have algorithms that show only a fraction of the posts from people you follow, but there’s a reason behind the posts you see. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest – they’re all evolving and getting smarter, and the algorithms will show you content similar to what you engage with. These algorithms are built to show you what you like. Your audience gives these platforms data every day with their likes, comments, saves, and shares, and these platforms reward accounts that have high engagement by showing their posts more often.
If you want to improve your organic reach, focusing on creating engaging content is crucial. You’ll want to create content that provides value to your audience and gives them a call to action. Invite them to like, comment on, and share your post, participate in polls and surveys, and turn on post notifications if they like what they see and want to know when you have new posts up. It’s important that you engage with them as well – when you reply to comments and engage with your audience, social media platforms recognize that and will show your content in their feeds. You can also grow your organic reach when your followers share your content with their followers, so be sure to make your content shareable and interesting.
Digital marketing is so important when it comes to growing your business, and when you have a healthy balance of paid promotions and organic reach, you can have a huge impact and bring in more revenue. Reach out to see how Scroll can help with your digital marketing and organic reach today.
