Organic and paid advertising opens up doors for potential clients to see your products or services. Paid advertising allows you to easily spread the word out of your newest product or service to thousands of people at a cost. Organic advertising is a strategy of being able to post your content and provide information with no budgets behind it. The downside is that you reach less of your target audience. Fortunately, with this type of advertising, you have many ways of posting. For example: posting memes, stories and posts with an image or a video (depending on which platform you’re using). I have noticed that organic videos get the most impressions on LinkedIn because of how its algorithm is structured. Let’s start first by discussing organic advertising and then we’ll move on to paid advertising.
Organic advertising may be the way to go for many businesses that are struggling during the pandemic since it comes with no additional cost. With this type of advertising your focus is to establish your company voice and make your content entertaining with videos and memes etc. Having a larger following on your social media pages gives you the luxury of seeing which type of content works for you and what doesn’t. To increase your organic reach and you’re following you can incorporate LinkedIn live or Facebook live content. By that I mean having a member of your upper management take 10 or 15 min of their day to be live on a social media platform and answer your audience’s questions. Another tactic you could use to increase engagement is using stories to create a certain buzz around your new product or service. If you think your organic content isn’t pulling its weight, check your insights and look at your analytics and see which content worked best for you in the past. One aspect that you should consider is to try to create a theme around your content or better yet a colour scheme that people would be familiar with when creating your content marketing strategy.
Here are some organic content ideas.
- How-to Posts
- Q and A
- Industry News
- Testimonials
- Tips
- Video Tutorials
- Creating a Poll
With paid advertising there are 2 categories we should focus on: SEO (search engine optimization) and social media platforms. SEO is about finding your website on the top of your search rankings. Having your website on top of the search rankings on Google, for example, would increase the chance of people clicking on your link and seeing what your company offers. PPC (paid per click) is the process of being charged when someone clicks on your ad. You have to remember that with pay-per-click advertising, you need to make sure you’re bringing your audience to the location where you want them.
With social media advertising, specifically paid advertising, there are many variables we should consider. When you are putting paid ads on social media the reach you get compared to organic ads is black and white, depending on how much money you are willing to put in your budget. With ads, you have the luxury on Facebook to be more specific with your targeting than on LinkedIn. Something you need to be cautious about is since LinkedIn is the most expensive platform you should focus on using CPC to get your ads up. Using CPM (cost per impression) will drain your budget in a matter of minutes. The combination of using either video or a captivating graphic with a sizable budget would allow you to grow your brand awareness to the size you want.
Organic advertising may be the way to go for small businesses. They might not have the budget available to market their business because of the pandemic. You can still take advantage of many features from going live on Facebook to making videos, about the services you offer. If your company can go forward and spend a sizable amount on your budget, take advantage of your ability to try to be on the top of search rankings on Google. You can also add the ability of using highly targeted ads on the social media platforms that your company uses to create brand awareness.