Date8th Jun 2018
CategoryUncategorized/
AuthorBoxed Red

Are You Using Your Paid Advertising to Boost Your Organic Traffic?

With algorithms constantly changing and social networks introducing new parameters to enforce a more engaging experience, is it time to enlist the help of paid advertising to boost your organic reach?

Simply put…YES!

Now that Facebook has restricted organic posts gaining traction for brand pages, boosting and promoting your posts is more important than ever.

Is Organic Social Media Dead?

It’s easy to think that the time is nigh for organic posts, with stories of Facebook reducing the number of posts your audience sees. Whilst you will undoubtedly experience a fall in the engagement rate and CTR of your organic posts because of these changes, it’s still important that you have a presence on Facebook and other social media channels.

There are a number of reasons why you should continue to post organic posts on social media:

They’re good for SEO! Your social channel exists in the organic search results, and if people are clicking through and seeing no new posts or information, you can almost guarantee they’re going to bounce. Whilst we’re never going to know the full goings on of the Google search algorithms, it’s true that brands with active social media channels have better rankings typically than those who don’t, so keep going!
Brand awareness is also key to organic posts. If people are just browsing for companies or products, the chances are they’ll visit your social media pages and if there’s no content, alarm bells will start ringing!
It’s free! Social media ads cost money, ok they’re much cheaper than PPC and other adverts, but they still cost. If you’re posting organically and you’re receiving engagement, not only have you got this attention for no cost, but the audience who are engaging with your posts are interested in what you’re saying, so make sure you keep posting!
Despite these reasons, it is true that organic reach, especially on Facebook, is declining due to these updates. The new social media landscape means that you may have to adopt a different strategy, where organic and paid adverts to work together.

Organic and Paid Advertising… Better Together?

With a change in algorithms, comes a change in strategy, and at Boxed Red, we believe a combination is the best possible outcome for your digital advertising. As we’ve already stated, organic posts do have their benefits, so don’t assume organic posting is dead.

Likewise, boosting every post and turning your social media into one big advert may also be the wrong move for you, as you could be constantly targeting an un-engaged audience – so by strategically combining the two, we believe you will yield the best results.

Facebook uses a number of signals to work out what content is relevant to its users and will then ‘learn’ to show more of the same or similar content rather than bombarding your customers with adverts.

This, in turn, means you will start to generate an audience who are engaged with your brand and as such, more likely to convert. You also need to remember, those who engage with your brand via paid for adverts may still also engage with your organic posts and vice versa.

Pay to Play

Facebook is now essentially a pay to play marketplace for advertising, as they aim to limit the reach of irrelevant organic posts from branded pages. However, when you pay for Facebook engagements and likes through your ads, you’re approaching your audience instead of the other way around, which can often lead to cold leads and empty likers a.k.a people who aren’t going to convert.

Paying for your Facebook adverts is a great way to increase your reach and engagement but if coupled with engaging organic posts on your page, you can truly grow an interested, highly relevant audience quickly.

You can do this by analysing your data from both organic and paid for likes, comments, and shares. If you notice that your paid content has a high number of likes but fewer shares and comments, you can safely assume that your reach is very good, but your targeting may be slightly off. By combining your paid and organic engagement data, you can develop an accurate audience which allows you to target more precisely in the future. And this is the real win of combining organic with paid advertising.

To Conclude

Essentially from an advertising point of view, Facebook is fantastic. You can segment your audience by age, gender, devices and more and then distribute your adverts accordingly.

By using this information to target your audience through the analysis of paid and organic reach and engagement, you can expand your growth extremely quickly if you do it right. With Facebook, knowledge is power and thankfully you have a whole host of user information to capitalise on.

To transform your social media campaign into a winning marketing strategy, get in contact with our friendly team today.

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