Organic vs. Paid Social Media Strategy for CPG Brands

It’s easy to pay-to-play. Marketing that incorporates paid social media works well for CPG branding strategies. But any marketing team knows that if you can garner a more organic following on social media, it’s much more effective—and impressive.

What is the difference between organic vs. paid social media marketing? Why does it make sense to have a mixture of both types of digital marketing to get the best results? We have answers.

What is Paid Social Media?

All that chatter on social media matters not a whit unless it’s read—and that is getting harder to achieve. That’s why companies have turned to paid social media advertising to build their brand.

Paid social media includes the activities sponsored by advertising budgets. Any advertisements, cost-per-click activities, or sponsored posts are all part of paid social media. Paid social media is a great way to improve the numbers if your organic social campaigns are faltering. It also allows you to target specific audience segments with the goal of converting them to your brand.

What is Organic Social Media?

Organic social media is any activity that wasn’t generated by a budget for views or clicks. Organic social media uses any of the free tools available to reach consumers with CPG branding. The big benefit of organic social is that it’s free, of course, so it’s an ideal way to stretch your CPG marketing budget.

Organic social is highly effective at maintaining existing customer relationships and building credibility for your brand. You can use these posts to reply directly to consumers, thereby boosting confidence in your CPG branding efforts. Organic social lets you also build campaigns with custom hashtags and create more transparency.

How Can CPG Branding Improve When Organic and Paid Sync?

Creating a hybrid strategy where both organic and paid media work in tandem is an effective way to reach bigger audiences more often. These tools become much more powerful when used together in a strategic effort where one boosts the other—and vice versa.

Over the past few years, organic posts have declined in reach, making it necessary to develop paid strategies to reach audiences. Those paid CPG marketing efforts can go viral, which creates more organic buzz in targeted audiences than a pay-to-play event ever could. 

If you have content that’s converting well, you can use paid social to get it out there to even more of your target audience. CPG branding teams can use their paid campaigns to reinforce the messaging that you release into an organic feed.

While these are just a few examples, it’s important to focus on both organic and paid media campaigns in a way that is connected, not siloed. Organic social media can support your paid efforts in a cohesive strategy to build your brand.

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If you’re wondering how your paid versus organic campaigns are performing, fill out the form below to download our free Sample Social Media Audit to ensure you’re on track with your CPG marketing campaigns.