Where do you think your most engaged audience is?
This is a question that crops up a lot for me during strategy sessions. I’ve recently seen some interesting ideas around how you can use your organic social following to your advantage, freeing up budget for Paid Social for brand awareness. While I wouldn’t recommend you stop all paid lead generation activity, it does raise an interesting question of how we value different audience pools, and how we can find synergy in organic and social strategies. (Hootsuite)
Shouldn’t paid activity be dedicated to finding new customers and pushing brand awareness?
Think of digital marketing like dating someone, you don’t put a ring on them on the first date do you? It takes time to build up a connection and actually figure out if you want a long-term relationship with them. Following them on Instagram is like testing the waters, seeing how interesting they are as a person, and if their values align with yours. All sound familiar? It’s a similar practice when potential customers discover your brand for the first time. With trust in social media advertising at 41% for 18-34-year-olds, rising year on year, it’s time we think about how we value our audiences. (Advertising Association)
Your brand awareness paid social campaigns are powerhouses for bringing new people in and getting them to engage with your brand, want something from them? Retarget your followers with sales activity. Make them feel special like they’re the only one that gets to know the offers. Commit to your followers and get better results. Use your organic platforms to build that genuine connection and brand story on your organic socials that keeps your followers coming back. (MailChimp)
But what about Lead Gen?!
Website interactions and social media followers are always the top-tier remarketing audiences in our clients’ social campaigns. We see website visitors as window shoppers, but, what can you do in your campaigns to connect with them and convert?
How can you implement this in your paid media strategy?
- Widen your audience pool
- Focus on brand awareness and storytelling, keeping the frequency nice and low, building that valuable brand connection
- Lookalike audiences based on social media followers and previous converters are gold dust, find more people like your customers and hook them with your brand story
- ‘Fluffy’ paid social CTA’s
- Really consider the journey you want to take the user on, and encourage them to check out your social account and give you a follow. This gets them into your remarketing audience pool to retarget later.
- The special ones get a prize
- Your remarketing audience should be your prized possession, make them feel like they’re the most valued. They are your social followers and those who have taken website actions after all – give them the best offers!
- Punchy organic social CTA’s
- Your social followers are your followers for a reason; they love your brand, love your content so reward them for their loyalty by offering exclusive offers or deals in your organic posts with punchy CTA’s. Slightly more sales-leading messaging is more likely to land with them as they’ve been a ‘friendlier’ audience pool for longer than someone who has seen a brand awareness ad one month and a lead gen ad the next.
What do you think about this way of using organic socials for lead gen?
