26 Jun Get your brand noticed in an overcrowded digital world

A paid social strategy is no longer an added-bonus but rather a necessity.

Digital marketers know that changes on social platforms are happening faster than we can plan, adapt and react. But changes and improvements indicate more opportunities to help your brand get noticed. The days of organic audience reach are gone and paid social media has taken center stage. Organic reach is at an all time low and continues to decrease, to the point where achieving a 1% organic engagement rate is considered “good”. A paid social strategy is no longer an added-bonus but rather a necessity. With so many brands competing for the same eyeballs, you want to adjust your social strategy to get the most bang for your buck. Engagement is at the heart of social media and chances are, you need your content to be seen multiple times to even begin to get noticed or elicit a response/action.

Advertising Week recently posted an article about it being time for social to grow up. In short, it indicates that brands should focus on creating content that connects, then take the time and spend the budget to give it a chance to do just that.

Here’s a brief recap:

• Paid social media is very cheap compared to other marketing mediums.
• According to the Pew Research Center, majority of the population in the U.S. use Facebook (68%), which makes it relevant for most target audiences.
• The data that can be acquired by testing ads and audiences with paid social media is amazing. You can determine what your target audience prefers in terms of creative content, text copy, promotion/coupon amounts, and more. This data can then be used as market information for other marketing channels.
• Even though organic reach is dead, paid social media is very well-received, so all you have to do is pay for it.

Below are a few tips to get your brand noticed:

• Develop a wholesome social media strategy and invest on paid social to get your content seen. Make sure to focus on A/B testing your ads and utilize the results to gain insights and determine your future strategy. This includes understanding the behavior of your target audience and banking on their engagement with the brand for future ads.
• Spend more money on production. With fewer posts, you have the opportunity to improve the quality of the content and provide your audience with something worthy of their attention.
• Finally, don’t expect immediate success—plan for content/post/ads to be seen multiple times so they cut-through and get noticed. Paid social media takes patience and hours of analysis to understand consumer behavior, however, the return on the investment far outweighs the time spent on it.

According to our Creative Director Manolo Guajardo, “it makes much more sense for brands to create better content coupled with better production behind it than trying to achieve a mandatory post count every week with random content.”

These tips align with a lot of the conversations we have had recently with our clients: make sure there’s a paid social media budget, quality over quantity when it comes to posts, and create campaigns that are given appropriate time to show adequate results.