Paid & Organic Social Media for the Holiday Season

The holiday season is fast approaching and we also have Black Friday just around the corner. The big question is: should you use paid or organic social media strategies to maximise your sales and overall engagement? 

We won’t keep you waiting, we know that it is really important to get the answers right away. After all, Black Friday is just a few days away. So, let’s get started and see how to increase your sales, traffic and engagement when you combine both paid and organic social media. 

Let us quickly go through the basics: 

👉 Paid social marketing, often referred to as Performance Marketing, is the process of sharing your message and getting it in front of your target audience by purchasing advertising space on a provider’s platform. Or, to put it human words – your Social Media Ad Campaign – Facebook Ads.

👉 Organic social marketing, on the other hand, encompasses all you do to establish a loyal consumer base on your social media channels. Think about creating great quality social media posts, blogs and be as creative and focused as possible.

If you truly want to stand out this holiday season – and we know you do – you must combine those two tactics into a “hybrid paid-organic social media strategy”. 

😕 Okay, but what does this mean? 

Have you ever heard of Batman? How about Robin? They are both pretty awesome on their own, but together they make a great duo to attain their ultimate aim. So ultimately this should be the idea behind the hybrid strategy. Better yet, think of your holiday season hybrid paid-organic social media strategy as the greatest duo ever – Santa and Rudolph.

Now let’s begin – here are our top 4 tips for a successful hybrid paid and organic social media strategy: 

• Have a clearly outlined audience

This goes for both organic and paid social. You need to clearly outline the customer profile and your messaging. If let’s say you have a tech shop, you would want to target early tech adopters and ensure you have the right messaging for them. Furthermore, let’s imagine that PlayStation 6 came up next week – you need to target people interested in gaming, the latest tech and gadgets. You would want to incorporate a message that corresponds between your organic posts and paid social ones. You can even retarget people who interacted with your organic post, in order to ensure they have seen and are interested in your offer. 

• Offer value over just using a sales pitch

We know you would like to increase your sales overall. We also understand the importance of growing your business and gaining more customers in general. What we believe will help you get there is offering great value to your existing and potential customers. ‌What do we mean by selling value? 

It’s easy – anything that shows your customers that the time they spent engaging with your brand has not been wasted. Furthermore, show them you are not “all about the money”, as Meja sang in 1997. You can provide your customers with useful information in the form of daily tips, maybe even educate them by providing them with free ebooks or PDF files. These will contribute to the value of your customers’ daily lives, for which they will remember you and most importantly – they will know you are not after their “dosh”. ‌

Even if you do not get a sale at this very moment – you will stay in your customers’ minds. 

• Creative campaigns with a little spice

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year” which means that it’s time to launch the most creative campaigns to boost your brand’s presence even further. Here’s an idea: if you own a bakery, you can easily create a 12 day to Christmas day. Each day a lucky winner (i.e. the person who engaged with your post) is being chosen and they get to win a free delicious Christmas cookie or your great homemade cinnamon-orange hot chocolate. This way you can increase your overall social media engagement and most importantly foot flow through your shop. There are lots of different types of competitions and giveaways, even charity events you can run. Get creative and as mentioned in point two – offer value to your followers and customers.

• Be active, creative and engage with your audience

Posting creative and interesting content is a great way to increase your overall organic social media engagement. A great tactic is to encourage your followers, users and customers to post feedback or personal experiences with your brand. It is also really important to stay engaged with your customers on both your organic and paid social posts. This way you will show your audience you care and this will increase your overall brand credibility and trust. 

Make sure that you are there for the bad times as well. Furthermore, when your customers have issues with either your product or service – be there for them and support them with what you can. Take your time to learn more about your audience, follow up on their requests, needs and wishes. In short, be there for your customers.

❗ Bonus tip:
Create a social media calendar to ensure your planned organic social activity will always be on time. 

This is all, folks – our 4 tactics to help you combine your paid and organic social activities over the upcoming holiday season. 

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