In today’s world, we can benefit from so many marketing tools and techniques that it makes it difficult to choose! With various marketing strategies at your disposal, it is important to determine which ones will work best for you. The following will help you understand what these are and what they are used for. Both paid and organic are tremendously important and most businesses use a healthy mix of both to optimise their marketing efforts. I like to think of the campaign-types as superheroes. Each one has different strengths so using a combination is generally the best way to fight the battle. Paid marketing is faster, often at a higher price, and is more measurable. Organic marketing is more steady, provides longer-term effectiveness, and can be used to establish yourself as a thought leader within your industry, as well as to boost brand credibility. 

Since search engines have existed, there have been digital marketing activities in some form or another. For businesses today, there are various channels you can explore to achieve your business goals digitally. Note that I said business goals digitally, not your digital goals. It is important to work backwards from your business goals in order to determine the best strategy for achieving them. 

Here is a list of organic marketing activities:

• SEO link building
• Podcasts 
• Social Media Marketing 
• Email Marketing 
• Content Marketing
• Guest blogs

Here is a list of paid marketing activities:

• LinkedIn Sponsored inMail, Sponsored Content, Text Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Instagram Ads
• Twitter Ads
• Google AdWords
• Bing and Yahoo Ads
• Amazon PPC

I’m sure I haven’t even exhausted this list as there are new marketing tools available to us regularly. As a non-marketer, there are actions you can take to fulfil your goals online and with a little bit of guidance, you can easily get started. However, as digital marketing becomes more competitive, there is a wealth of knowledge required to manage these activities. Thus, it is important to pick a few channels and focus specifically on those rather than spreading yourself too thin. 

Organic Marketing

1. Organic marketing is intention-driven and is labour intensive. You manually promote creative content, whether this is visuals or copy.
2. Organic marketing spans all social media platforms, search engines, and websites.
3. Organic techniques are mainly used for “top of the funnel” brand awareness activities to familiarise your target audience with your brand, tone of voice and product/service.
4. These activities are used to establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche or industry. It is a great way to educate your audience on the problem-solution fit and product-market fits that your brand looks to achieve.
5. Bottom line is that the more relevant and original content you create, the greater your chances are to attract an engaged audience. The effects of the content generated digitally last for a long period of time making this a long-term investment.

Paid Marketing

1. It is possible to run paid campaigns across various digital channels but the objective must be clear. It is specifically to drive certain actions from your audience.
2. Paid marketing is often more expensive than organic since it involves Cost-Per-Click or CPM (Cost-Per-1000 Impressions) campaigns. However, organic can become expensive too if you are producing regular content for your digital channels as it involves a tremendous amount of talent and labour. 
3. Paid marketing achieves short-term results that can be advantageous to your business when you rapidly need to grow. Alternatively, it can also help with ‘failing fast’ when you want to receive feedback on an assumption and quickly validate it. 
4. Paid marketing helps with conversions, traffic campaigns, brand awareness, lead generation, driving impressions, and acquiring larger audiences quickly.
5. These campaigns help with achieving a promising ROI or ROAS on direct and measurable investments made.

Both paid and organic have their advantages. It can be easy to be mesmerized by the effects of any superhero. However, which one will save your day? If you would like to learn more about what your strategy should be, which channels you should use, and further insights on your potential to grow within your industry, contact us at hello@socialgamma.com 

You may not have heard of Pinterest if you are not an avid fan of arts and crafts. Pinterest is a hub of quirk and interest, an online visual search engine that allows its users to discover, pin (aka collect on a page/profile) and share pictures and videos relating to their interests. They pin these items on “Boards” – different pages they label as subcategories like Fashion, Craft, House Inspo and so on.

Pinterest is a huge hit amongst the public as a personal tool, but what benefits can it provide to your business? Like all social networks, it can be used carefully and cleverly as a marketing tool to do 5 key things.

Grow Your Audience

The more frequently you use the site, the more likely your content is to be pinned. When this happens, your content and services are exposed to new groups of people, with massive global potential.

Grow Brand Awareness

With all these potential people seeing your content, it’s a great opportunity to reinforce your brand values and personality by selecting content that fits. As you are more active and engaging, the audience learn more about you and this helps to build brand awareness and loyalty.

Improve your SEO

Using the correct keywords across Pinterest can help to improve not just Pinterest Search Rankings, but also Google Search Rankings for your business.

Increase Website Traffic

Creating content to pin allows you to include a direct link to your website, product or service! This means that every single piece of content you are sharing can have a direct call-to-action with potentially great results.

Place Ads

Like other platforms, Pinterest even allows you to turn your content into ads and will place them across the network. These appear to a person looking like normal pins – almost. They have a small text indication that the piece of content is an advertisement. They have an easy to use ad manager that allows you to define audience characteristics including Age, Gender, Interests, Location, Language and Device. You can even use business analytics so you can see how your ad is doing.

This is all great! But how do you know if Pinterest is for you? Have a look at what your business is promoting and compare it carefully to the type of content and consumers on Pinterest. If you are a finance business, then it might not be the right move. However, if you are a fashion, beauty, furnishings or even craft brand then Pinterest could be a roaring success for you. All you need then is content that can make you stand out from the crowd.

Facebook and Instagram are major players in the modern social media marketing game. Any business worth their salt invest time and even money into excellently curated feeds, so that they can have that unique connection with customers that just didn’t exist before the age of social media. But what are the benefits of these sites, and is one better than the other?

Let’s look at Facebook first.

Benefits:

Facebook has a massive impact on how the public interact with each other and has been around far longer than Instagram. It’s a great place for businesses to update their consumers on upcoming events and happenings, as well as sharing articles they are interested in. Facebook’s algorithm supports video content beyond all else, so video ads or updates are a great way to get a bigger reach.

Negatives:

Most Facebook users primarily use it for social purposes. That is, they connect with friends and family while businesses are less of a priority. Even the name itself doesn’t promote “faceless corporations”. It also has an overall older audience than Instagram, which can be bad depending on your target market.

What about Instagram?

Benefits:

Instagram is a highly visual form of media, allowing businesses to showcase some design and aesthetic skill, and reinforce their visual identity. The more a company’s brand identity is seen, the more associations a customer builds with the brand, making it more memorable and more likely to be used. Instagram also has a more current feel to it, not just because it is a younger site, but because of the “instant” share element of stories. Companies can show themselves as more relatable by sharing day-to-day happenings through stories. While Facebook has this option too, it is used much less.

Negatives:

Instagram has a lot of content restrictions, for example you cannot share hyperlinks in posts. This means that businesses cannot make use of article and blog sharing as easily, something that is beneficial to the tech and finance industries. Another issue is that many companies use bots to increase their following, and Instagram is catching on. The anti-bot algorithms make it difficult to keep up with what is acceptable and what isn’t. Optimising hashtags is a constant job, discovering what is relevant but also unique enough that you won’t get buried. Having a social media team to keep on top of all the changes is the best way to get the best of both worlds.

There are plenty of positives and negatives to both sites, and which site you should focus on also depends on your intentions. If you have a younger audience, Instagram is the way, whereas if you’re more business focused, the lack of link sharing on Instagram might be detrimental. The best approach to social media is to make use of all the available platforms, and a combination of both Facebook and Instagram used in the correct way can be a powerful strategy.

Get in touch through the Contact page to find out how our Social Media Services can help your business bloom.