Yes, you’re reading that right.
Organic content is alive, well and kicking, and is even more important than you might think.
It has the power to form the backbone of your paid advertising strategy playing a vital supporting role in the overall success and return on your investment.
Some might even suggest that paid advertising stands on the shoulders of organic social, and there are very good reasons as to why this is.
How Organic Social Content Directly Affects Your Paid Advertising Performance
1. The Addition of Social Proof
Before anyone clicks on your ad, they check your profile. It’s become a learned human behaviour and standard practice.
When a customer is served a sponsored post, their very next move is to tap through to your page, and get a fuller picture of you, your business and what you have to offer.
A sparse, inconsistent, or stale feed may end up hurting your performance, as opposed to a profile filled with engaging, consistent organic content that tells a story.
A paid ad will always convert better when it lands on a profile that radiates credibility.
2. Building Trust & Authenticity
Understandably, consumers are much more sceptical now than they have ever been in a world with an onslaught of scams and AI-generated content.
With that has come the ability to scroll past the overly-produced, and suspiciously polished content, and stay for the content that feels genuinely human.
Organic content is one of the best ways to let your personality and humanity through. Whether it’s behind-the-scenes content, stories, pieces to camera, it’s the content that builds trust over time.
Yes, a slow burner, but one that makes your paid advertising far more potent when they eventually appear.
3. Creative Testing Launchpad
It may not be overtly obvious, because it’s typically not something platforms are expressly forward with, but, the algorithms you rely on for your paid advertising are also looking at your organic content, so that they too can avoid pushing any advertising from businesses that feels spammy and unreliable.
On platforms like Meta in particular, high-performing organic posts can be boosted, and often outperform purpose-built ads, precisely because they have proven engagement signals already attached to them.
Even thinking beyond the algorithms, a sure fire way to create a paid advertising strategy that resonates, grabs attention and converts, is by using organic content as a testing ground.
It is a free way to test messaging, creative variations and tone of voice, and which combinations are the most effective at making people stop scrolling, insights and learnings that can be taken directly into your paid campaigns as strategy.
Your best organic content can tell you what to spend money on, and guide you in making informed, evidence-backed decisions, rather than playing a guessing game off a hunch.
4. Building Retargeting Audiences
Every person that engages with your organic content, from liking, commenting, saving, story viewing, profile visits, enters a “warm” audience pool, categorised as people who have already expressed some level of interest in what you do.
Paid advertising to this audience is uniquely different from advertising to cold traffic, as this audience has context and familiarity with your business and its offering, which can have a direct impact on conversion rate and cost per result.
Without an organic content strategy that builds this audience, you lose the opportunity to reach the people that are the most authentically engaged with what you have to offer.
The best way to think of your organic strategy is like it’s an always-on, zero-cost lead generation engine that can directly feed into paid campaigns.
When you neglect your organic content, you are limited to full-priced, cold audience targeting, but invest in organic, and you have an evolving, cost-efficient asset that can maximise your budget and make it work harder for you.
5. Cohesive & Consistent Messaging
Only telling a fraction of the overall story, your paid ads are engineered to optimise for specific actions,whether it’s driving website traffic, submitting a form or boosting engagement.
The problem is, if a user can’t establish the connection between your paid ads and your organic feed, because there’s a completely different tone, disjointed branding or irrelevant topics, you’ll lose them.
Organic content is an extension of your paid advertising and it should elaborate on the promises of ads, while keeping the messaging and branding consistent & cohesive, remembering that trust and authenticity carries significant weight.
Paid advertising is a powerful asset that scales reach, accelerates growth and can provide notable return on investment, which is why, when it’s such a significant part of your marketing strategy, you need to do what you can to support it.
Every cent you spend on paid advertising can work harder or softer, depending on the foundation you’ve built beneath it.
Social proof, trust, intentional creative, retargeting and cohesion all sit at the heart of a successful paid strategy, and are conditions that can impact how your paid advertising actually performs.
Do you need help with aligning your organic social strategy with your paid advertising? Contact our team today to discuss curating content that balances creativity with strategy.