Don’t Sleep on Paid Social -

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Don’t Sleep on Paid Social

WHY IT MATTERS: Social media marketing is a “pay-to-play” environment, meaning paid social is a must. Organic reach can be dismal so set a reasonable ad spend budget and hone in on your targeting to get the ROI you want.

What’s the difference?

Paid social refers to the social posts you put an ad spend behind to ensure they show it to your preferred audience. Organic social is just the opposite—the posts that go up and leave their results up to the algorithm, the free content.

If you ask us, organic social is dead. Let’s talk about why paid social is where the ROI is…

Organic isn’t enough

The reason most brands get on social, invest in a team, and build a strategy is to generate ROI. That’s what any good marketing initiative is meant to do, right? The mistake we see repeatedly is business leaders claiming that social media marketing doesn’t work when they’ve relied 100% on organic content. If we’re honest, it can be a waste of time for everyone involved.

Organic social media puts your content in a box—a tiny box. You’ll only reach a percentage of your existing followers, maybe a handful of your followers’ followers, and some who follow any hashtags you use. That’s not enough to do the heavy lifting.

What can paid social do?

Paid social is a requirement on most platforms if you want continued, sustainable success. Whether the goal of your brand’s efforts is to increase sales, qualified leads, donations, volunteers, event attendees, followers, etc., putting some ad spend behind your content is a must.

What’s best about paid social is the control social platforms offer to users; you aren’t just throwing ad spend dollars into the void hoping they stick. Instead, your social media ads are highly customizable, enabling you to build target audiences.

Additionally, it’s all trackable. So, when you put money behind a post that doesn’t seem to be hitting the mark, you can simply cancel the ad and reallocate those funds to try something new. Some key metrics to keep in mind include:

– Cost per click (CPC)
– Cost per action (CPA)
– Cost per 1000 reached (CPM)
– Cost per lead
– Cost per engagement

By putting aside a budget for paid social and being strategic with those dollars, you’ll grow your audience and secure ROI.

Let’s talk budget

Your ad spend budget is just that, YOURS! It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what each brand should spend because there really is no magic number. Of course, more is always better. But we have clients at all levels regarding how much they spend on paid social.

For some, mainly our nonprofit clients with engaged social audiences, we allot about $250 per month to ad spend. For higher dollar clients, we may spend as much as $4,000 per month spread across their Meta profiles (Instagram and Facebook), LinkedIn, and TikTok.

In our experience, even the smaller budgets make a huge difference when the content is engaging. We could talk about our ad results all day, which we’re massively proud of. But ultimately, it’s important to remember how crucial those promotional dollars are.

Our recommendation?

Our recommendation is simple. Your social effort needs ad spend, but it also needs organic posts. Here’s what we mean:

You need to publish regularly scheduled content, but not every post will be worthy of or need ad spend behind it. Organic social is necessary for profile building and ongoing communication with your existing audience.

For the content that you’d like your audience to hone in on? Boost it! Your content mix requires organic AND paid promotional content to be successful and effective. We can help.