Paid content vs organic content, how you should use it to grow your entertainment business

Paid content vs organic content, how you should use it

A common question that I get asked is what is the difference between paid content vs organic content on social media. Well the basics for those that don’t know, organic content is just the posts you make on your page that only your followers see, paid content is where you pay the platform to show the ads to people in demographics of your choosing.

Now what’s the big difference on how you should use it? There’s one massive piece that I find that a lot of brands mess up. I’ll keep it nice and simple here, for your organic content that is for community building, it’s showing people who already know you and already follow you your content, you don’t need to convince them of who you are, show them things they want to see and build a community around it. Now for paid content, this is where you put your sales shoes on. Every time someone views your paid content, the platform is charging you for that, so you want to make sure that the content people are seeing is content that is going to turn them into a fan, like your page, book your experience, share it with their friends, whatever the end goal is. There’s no wasting time putting whatever you want into paid content, because in this case time is literally money. For your paid content you need to make sure you have a strategy to go with it, preferably aligned with your whole marketing/brand strategy as a whole, but don’t just throw whatever you want up and hope you get results.

When it comes to paid content you are in competition, and for the most part you are in competition with people who have a lot more money than you. There’s big brands out there like Nike, Coca-Cola, Dave and Busters, Amazon, whoever it is that seem to have infinitely more money than you, if they decide they want to target the same demographic as you they’re going to be able to pay for customers to see their ads 10x as much as you can, so you have to make your paid content count. High quality, quick to the point, tells the story, and hooks the customer. The average American sees 4,000-10,000 ads a day, what are you going to do to stand out?

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Now I wrote a whole separate blog that touches on how you should use your organic social media, I recommend giving that a read here (How to build a digital brand people actually want to follow). But in short, your organic social media is for maintaining contact and interest from the people who already know who you are, it’s not as much trying to attract new customers as it is reminding old customers how much fun they had and why they should come back.

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Now a side note when it comes to paid content. Make sure you are targeting effectively, don’t just go throw a Facebook boost onto your random post, find the demographic you’re targeting, create content they will like, and then find them through ads manager targeting so you’re not wasting a whole bunch of money on nothing. I’ve touched on this example in the past but I will reference it again, when you’re doing paid advertising think of targeting as more of a sniper rifle than a grenade, you’re going to be precise and get it in front of exactly who you want, rather than just throwing a grenade in a general direction and hoping it gets who you want it to. The grenade method wastes a lot of money getting it in front of the wrong people, and when your competition is like the big companies listed above that seem to have infinite money, then that’s not a battle you want to have, because I guarantee they aren’t using grenades, they’re using nuclear bombs with how much ad spend they’ve got.

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