By Craig Foster, Director of Media.
Recently I wrote about how boosting posts on social media sites can help improve the results of your lead-generation campaigns, “Boosted Posts Are the Key to Improving Your Lead Generation Campaigns.” As I wrote, a boosted post strategy is a cost-effective way to increase engagement on your posts and to build your audiences that can then be targeted as part of lead-generating campaigns.
But what about organic social media? Can it help support your paid ad campaigns and give you a boost when you don’t have any extra budget to spare? The answer to the question is that it can help, but your expectations should be different. Let’s take a look at why it can help you and what you should be posting.
Organic social media posts can help support paid ad campaigns in a few ways including brand awareness, brand credibility, engagement, content testing, retargeting, social proof, or generating influence and cost efficiency. I’ll explain what I mean by all these terms in the following paragraphs.
Brand awareness is a simple one. If all you have is a social media page and you are not taking the time to post on the page, people who see your page will not know anything about you, what you do, and why someone should be connected with your business. Similar to your website, social media pages act as a digital storefront, even if individual people don’t look at each post or make buying decisions the first time they see your page and posts.
When it comes to engagement, Organic social media posting allows you to connect directly with your audience, encourage conversations, and receive feedback. By engaging with your followers through comments, messages, and discussions, you can better understand their preferences, needs, and pain points. This knowledge can inform your paid ad campaigns, ensuring they are more relevant and appealing to your target audience.
Posting can be a great testing ground for new content and ideas. When you share posts and monitor their performance, you can gauge audience response, identify trends, and determine what types of content generate the most engagement. This data can be valuable for optimizing your campaigns, enabling you to allocate resources and produce high-performing ads.
Posts will contribute to your retargeting efforts in your campaign, just like with boosted posts the more people who see and interact with your posts the better it can be for your retargeting. When users engage with your content, such as liking, commenting, or sharing posts, they become part of your retargeting audience. You can then retarget these engaged users with relevant paid ads to further nurture their interest and potentially convert them into leads.
When your posts get traction, which is when they receive likes, comments, and shares, they generate social proof. Social proof refers to the influence created when people observe others engaging with your content positively. This social proof can enhance the effectiveness of your paid ad campaigns by generating a sense of trust and credibility which can motivate users to take action when they see your paid ads. Ultimately, social proof can help convert the users engaging with your content to leads.
When you leverage your organic reach, you can develop a group of followers and engagement without spending money on ads to reach these people. This helps reduce your overall advertising costs and allows you to allocate more of the budget toward paid campaigns that require a broader reach or specific targeting. While not as effective at reaching people as boosted posts, it can help cultivate a more engaged audience for your brand in a cost-effective manner.
To get lead-generating engagement from your posting strategy, you need to make sure that you are posting the right type of content. When it comes to the financial advisory space, the content you post should help establish you as a trusted expert in your field, show that you are part of the community you belong to, and are engaged and timely to the current trends your audience cares about.
The posts can include educational content, market updates, FAQs, common mistakes, client success stories, visual content such as infographics or short videos, finance tips, retirement plannings tips, book recommendations, industry news, or other resources for financial information, client testimonials, events you are involved in, radio or TV appearances, and more.
The key to organic social media is in creating, curating, and engaging with content that will engage the audience in an authentic way (not in a way that seems dispassionate or sales-oriented) and fits the brand you are trying to portray. It is also always good to stay away from industry-specific terms and talk about subjects, in the same manner, someone at home might talk about it. This helps to show authenticity and if you’ve read any of my posts about Generation X, you would know that being authentic is highly important when it comes to engaging your audience. And, as always, make sure that when posting you are complying with regulations for the financial services industry.
So, while organic posting may not produce greater results than paid social media advertising, Organic social media actually helps paid ad campaigns by building brand awareness, engaging with the audience, testing content, providing retargeting opportunities, being cost-efficient, and amplifying social proof. Combining organic and paid strategies in a cohesive marketing approach can help your social media presence produce tangible results for your business.
About the Author: Craig comes to us after 7 years at an agency and working independently in digital marketing, focusing on digital campaign creation and strategy. He did most of his work solving data problems and coming up with data-driven solutions and strategies. Craig grew up in the Boston area and graduated with a BS in Business Administration from Johnson and Wales University. When not working on digital marketing you might find him coaching a CrossFit class or spending time with his daughter.
