While social media used to primarily appeal to businesses that wanted to grow their brand and connect with customers for free, in recent years it’s becoming more important to invest in a combination of paid and organic social media marketing. That means you need to find the right balance for your brand. To do this, you need to conduct some competitive research.
For instance, if you’re in the medical industry, specifically focused on recruiting, it’s important to look at how your competitors are reaching their target audience on social media, whether that includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter. It’s not just about making your brand present on every channel – it’s more about knowing where your target market is spending their time.
When working with a medical recruiting company, Skyrush Marketing conducted a competitive analysis before devising a social media marketing strategy for the new client. They found that while initially LinkedIn seemed like it would be the most viable options for reaching medical professionals, the market was actually more focused on Facebook when it came to paid social media advertising. When conducting an A/B test, over 80% of the client’s leads came in through Facebook/Instagram compared to LinkedIn. It was initially surprising, but after digging into the data, it was clear that for this specific industry, anesthesiology, more of the nursing professionals were aware of video lead generation ads on Facebook than those on LinkedIn which includes very different targeting options.
That’s not to say that Facebook is better than LinkedIn. There is no hard-set rule – it all depends on your specific campaign and your business objectives. In fact, we also found that LinkedIn was generating more engagement on organic posts than those on Facebook. Over 52% of the social mentions were coming from organic LinkedIn posts. Again, it’s something you might not predict without running a structured A/B test, which demonstrates how important it is not to make assumptions about paid and organic social media marketing.
If the medical recruiting client hadn’t built up a presence organically on LinkedIn while also focusing on paid advertising on Facebook/Instagram, the overall social media marketing strategy wouldn’t have had the most impact. Critical to developing the proper balance of organic and paid social media posts was finding the right social media management tool. In the current case study, the social media monitoring tool utilized was eClincher, which allowed the marketing agency to track all likes, reactions, comments, and shares for both organic and paid posts. In addition, your management platform should also allow brands to integrate their Google Analytics account, which makes it easier to determine if your campaigns are driving traffic to your site or increasing the conversion rate.
However, a social media monitoring tool can’t do everything. You need to have the right digital marketers working behind the scenes, continuously optimizing the social media strategy. This requires a combination of graphic designers, copywriters, analysts, and account executives who can focus on each aspect of the strategy and ensure that everything is running smoothly.
There are different tactics necessary for developing a paid social media strategy and an organic social media strategy. Below, you’ll find a helpful chart which demonstrates some of the key points to consider for each strategy:
Of course, the chart above doesn’t cover every technique for optimizing your social media marketing, but it’s definitely a start. At the very least, we recommend finding a solid social media management platform to start collecting initial research regarding your most popular posts and ads, best times to post, and which targeting options are working best for your brand. Social media marketing is a continuous process – it’s not something you can just plan out for the year and let run. By constantly monitoring your progress, it allows you to make data-driven decisions and switch strategies as needed.
Skyrush Marketing’s Expertise in Social Media Marketing
If you’re looking for a new social media marketing strategy, Skyrush Marketing can set up an initial consultation with you to determine how to best meet your needs. We will come up with the perfect balance of organic and paid social posts to ensure that your presence on key social media platforms grows.