In pretty much any industry or brand, someone or an agency is responsible for the number of posts, how many times the brand engages with the community, and how your social campaigns are running. While this type of work is necessary for a business, it can still be hard work. In fact, it takes so much to handle your followers/consumers and manage campaigns at the same time. This makes it difficult for your company (especially your marketing team) to see the full scope of things, and strategically find out what works for the brand and what doesn’t. 

As one can tell, social media marketing has evolved over the past few years. In fact, brands have already gone from creating strategies used to engage with customers and create more genuine and personal presence online, to utilizing social media to get to more customers. 

Now, if your brand is looking to optimize its social media, it should consider both paid and organic social media strategies. But, is it really possible to use both to help lead and nurture customers and extend your reach? 

First, let’s see how paid and organic social media strategies operate, and why they would make a great hybrid strategy. Consider the roles that each one plays. 

Benefits of Paid Social

“Over the years, paid advertising has become very profitable for Facebook and other social media sites,” says Willie Steffes, a business writer at OXEssays and Revieweal. “And as paid advertising rises among any possible marketing strategy to date, social media platforms have less to gain from reaching users organically.”

So, if the “drive revenue” nature of organic social media campaigns isn’t reason enough, here are reasons why running paid socials can be help your brand reach more people:

• As organic reach continues to be at an all-time low, paid social allows brands to beat the algorithms, and to connect with unforeseen audiences that may not have discovered the brands in the first time. 

• Let’s say you’ve developed a content offering that’s converting like crazy. Why not use paid social to spread this offer to your ideal audience? This helps you get a boost in conversions.

• Did you know that 64% of users say they use social media to find shopping inspiration? This means that they’re more likely to run into promotions and offers. 

• Paid social media campaigns help you reinforce the values and messaging that your organic campaigns convey.

• Paid campaigns allow you to target the right audience, tapping into the precise users that you want to reach. 

Benefits of Organic Social

Sometimes, the “drive revenue” approach can still be beneficial to one’s brand.

“An organic presence is all about communication with the community,” says Kiera Mistry, a marketing blogger at Eliteassignmenthelp and Academized. “Staying in contact with past, present, and potential users helps you reach them organically. In fact, it’s as easy as writing a blog post about it.”

Here are a few reasons why your brand should professionally monitor and manage your social media accounts:

• Organic social costs zero dollars. (You heard right: It costs nothing at all.)

• Organic social helps you manage your brand’s reputation and your relationships with customers. Whenever a customer has issues, be sure to reply to them in a timely manner, so that you can boost confidence in your brand. It’s important to listen to your audience, and acknowledge their observations and suggestions on how to make improvements. And, you can even build a community of like-minded individuals who share the same values as your company.

• Transparency and trust are important to your customers. Organic social campaigns allow you to be transparent with your customers (and potential ones), and to build that trust that keeps them coming back for more.

• Did you know that hashtags (including custom ones) can help you develop free campaigns for your brand?

• Are you a good storyteller? Social channels can help you tell a compelling story about your brand. Make it engaging and exciting for your consumers. 

• Organic socials allow you to create user-generated content (UGC). With UGC, you and your marketing team don’t have to spend a lot of time focusing on creating content. UGCs take the guesswork out of knowing what users want to see and don’t want to see, thus helping you create valuable content. 

What It Means To Marketers

Although the advice that’s about to be given is simple, it would still make sense for you as a marketer. Many marketers will tell you to just “swim with the tide.” At some points in your company’s lifetime, you’ll have to make major changes to your marketing strategy for the sake of reaching more people. And let’s face it: There’s nothing wrong with a little change every once in a while – that’s what experienced marketers will tell you.

However, being willing to change is ultimately up to you and your marketing team. Embracing change can be good or bad, depending on the circumstances. And this major change should be a philosophical one, as you talk it over with the members of your team. 

While organic social media allows you to reap the rewards over time, you can no longer expect people to see your ad on a billboard. Rather, you need to focus on not only building your brand, but also engaging with your community. Though, wouldn’t be much better to have the best of both worlds?

In most cases, companies are open to a hybrid strategy, because it can achieve relatively low PPC costs with paid social media campaigns. While that’s going on, you can continue to lead and nurture audiences with an organic social approach.

Why You Should Combine Both

The “hybrid strategy” is coined in this article to suggest a combination of organic and paid social strategy to create a good marketing strategy for your brand. To put it another way: paid social media campaigns give you immediate visibility to users and organic social gives your brand long-term credibility. 

One of the ultimate purposes of the hybrid strategy is to help you save money, rather than having to throw lots of money away on an elaborate campaign that might only attract a handful of people in the end. It’s also about balancing between paid and organic social strategies that help you get your brand out there.

According to a recent survey, 86% of marketers claim that the hybrid strategy has worked for them. The hybrid strategy also lets you experiment with organic social, email campaigns, and other no- or low-cost methods, while using the successful one for paid social ads and promotions. In addition, it’s easy to keep track of both your paid and organic social posts by using analytics, and determining which days and times are the most effective times to post something. 

Benefits of Using The Hybrid Strategy

Does the hybrid strategy feel like something that your brand needs? Whether or not you’re sold on the idea yet, you may be glad to know more of the benefits that come from this strategy, and that help you breeze by your competitors:

• Helps you understand your target audience by using data and real interactions

• Allows you to develop niche, loyal followings that enjoy the organic social experience

• Helps you leverage new shopping features on social media to make purchasing easy for consumers

• Enables marketers to tell great stories that captivate audiences

• Helps establish transparency in the brand and consumer trust

• Puts customer acquisition costs (CAC) first, establishes it as a critical growth factor and as a benchmark for ad spend

• Helps lower CPC costs, while boosting ROI in return

• Establishes the difference between vanity metrics and essential KPIs

• Allows flexible and experimental approaches to appear in the social marketing scheme

• Understands the importance of company transparency, personalization, quality, and consumer trust 

• Explores new, innovative ways of delivering products to the market, giving your brand an excellent advantage when it comes to quality, pricing, and delivery options.

Conclusion

Nowadays, search engines are going to stir people one way or another. In other words, algorithms are constantly changing, unless you want to counter it (which, most of the time, requires you to pay out of pocket for ‘adequate’ advertising). Therefore, as users are on social media more and moreover the years, marketers must at least meet them halfway by reaching out to them on social media. With social media platforms already offering free tools to help combine paid and organic elements, that alone allows you to build an audience and grow your brand. 

As you take on a hybrid approach for the company, always remember the two components that create that hybrid: 

• Paid social reach draws people’s attention to your brand; AND 

• Organic reach creates the trust that you need to keep those people.

Although the odds and ends of social media can be tricky to maneuver through, it has already been a game-changer in businesses; and it takes careful planning in the marketing department. Instead of selecting either paid or organic reach, learn how you can combine both to create a great marketing strategy for your brand. With a hybrid strategy, you’ll be able to keep your brand front in center to potential customers.

Katherine Rundell writes for Do my assignment and Big Assignments. She helps clients grow personally and professionally in a fast-changing and unstable market. Katherine enjoys writing at Top assignment writing services in Australian Capital Territory on different aspects of self-care, parenting and healthy lifestyles. She’s vegan and enjoys practicing yoga outdoors.