Organic social media marketing involves the use of unpaid methods (the posts that are free for you to post) to increase your brand awareness, engage with your community and drive traffic to your business. It relies on the creation of content that attracts, nurtures and converts your most profitable audience without spending money on advertising.

Paid social media advertising involves spending money to display promotional content to a targeted audience. This can include sponsored posts, display ads, and other paid promotional content.

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Why Redlands Coast small businesses should consider investing in Organic Social Media Marketing over paid ads in 2024:

 

It's free. Whereas you have to pay for your ad spend when running paid ads, your organic social media posts are free to create and share with your online audience.

It's a more authentic approach, which is especially important 2024 when research states users are sick of being sold at all the time, especially on social media platforms that they use in their downtime and to be entertained. With authenticity through social media content being a crucial strategy for small businesses with the goal of attracting and converting more customers via their social media 2024, this approach builds more genuine relationships and trust with your target audience- by showcasing your brand's personality and values- than paid ads can.

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It's a long-term solution: Organic social media marketing establishes a lasting online presence and brand loyalty over time. It doesn't just result in viewers of your ad and potentially a sale, it results in an engaged following and raving fans who choose to follow you. Therefore they remain within your sales funnel, without feeling like they're being sold to or targeted by ads.

With privacy laws strengthening in regards to what personal information social media platforms can provide to advertisers, the ability to target specific audiences is declining. That specific data and information that advertisers can access and use to show their ads to a specific audience (as someone who has run lots of paid ads let me tell you, you would be very surprised with exactly what Facebook knew about you and your behaviour, and allowed us to tap into. However this is changing) is no longer as detailed or extensive, which means your ad is less likely to reach your exact target audience.

Paid ads generally won't work without a strong organic social media presence anyway. For our clients interested in a paid ad approach, it is vital that we first ensure they have a library of organic content that speaks exactly to their target audience, so that when they click on a paid ad to learn more about their brand, product or service it is obvious to them that they can trust the brand, would like to follow them and help them decide to spend their money with the business.

The best paid ad content is content that did well organically. This is because the messaging was on point and it resonated with the target audience. For this reason, it's always advised to start with organic social media marketing before considering paid ads.

 

'Boosting' a post is not a paid ad, and setting up and running paid ads correctly can be quite challenging for small business owners or those who haven't done it before. An ad that is set up incorrectly will result in the wrong audience being targeted (ever see those ads for a cute cafe and you click through only to see it's located in Canberra. When you live in Cleveland? Yeah, they were set up incorrectly.) The real shame here is the business owner obviously needs a boost in foot traffic and customers so is possibly doing it a bit tough financially, yet they've ended up paying each time someone saw that ad... Which is a complete waste of money if it's people on the other side of the country who could never come in to grab a coffee. 

Besides being very costly for small businesses, paid ads results are much like a tap. When turned on, a good ad can definitely result in more leads and sales. But one they're turned off, that momentum stops. If you are after steady and consistent sales in your business, paid ads might not be the right choice for you (unless you can afford to keep them running all the time).

And last, but probably most important is the fact that Tiktok is currently trialling a paid version for its users where for a small fee they get access to an ad-free version of the app. If this proves successful and is rolled out for all users, and is adopted by other platforms, this will completely change the game and negatively impact paid ad campaigns as a whole. In our opinion, paid ads is not a good long-term solution for any business right now.