
Organic content is great for communicating your brand culture and values. It’s a good recruitment tool, helping prospective employees get a sense of what working at your company is like. Organic can help address customer service issues. However, you shouldn’t think of it as a free ad replacement tool. Organic does come with costs and can sometimes not deliver on goals as well as paid.
Production quality
Sure, you don’t need a cinema camera to shoot an organic video – but you do need many of the other things that go into a TV or film shoot. Getting the right talent is vital. Anyone who’s capable of going on camera and being captivating to a social audience knows it, and will want to get paid for their efforts. Nobody does anything for “exposure” anymore. You’ll need sound (because audiences will forgive bad video more than bad sound) and lighting. You’ll also need a location. Every building or landmark that’s recognizable is likely copyrighted by someone. As a brand, you’ll need to pay for the rights to use it in your video.
Playing the algorithms
When you run an ad or promote a post, you pay for your content to be shown to a certain size audience. It takes you out of the algorithm and puts you into the ad server. When you’re going organic, you’re not guaranteed of anyone seeing your content. The biggest factor is your account’s engagement score. The rule of thumb is to put out three posts to raise engagement before putting out an organic post that has an important message. That’s a lot of content to create. You’ll also need to like and comment on other posts that are reaching the audience you want to attract. That can be real work and usually requires hiring someone to do it for you – unless you have time to be on Instagram or TikTok all day.
Losing the sales message
Content that does well organically doesn't have a strong sales message. Many platforms also won’t let you put a clickable link in organic posts. That’s fine if you’re a large corporation looking to create positive sentiment or support a larger ad campaign. If you’re a small- or medium-sized company that needs to drive website clicks or collect leads, you’ll be spending a lot of time and money and getting little or nothing back in sales.
But what about __________?
Of course, there are brands who have been highly successful with organic content. But that’s the exception and not the rule. Not everyone is an ultra-high interest brand associated with musicians and athletes like Liquid Death or Red Bull. Not everyone has the massive PR engine of The Ice Bucket Challenge. When you see an organic post with thousands of likes, you can virtually guarantee someone is spending money to get it there – whether that means a paid media, a PR effort, or celebrity activations.
Do that math
Before deciding on paid versus organic, compare the costs of each. If you have people on staff who can create content and stoke the algorithms, without getting in the way of their primary job responsibilities, organic might be a good option. If you need to hire those people from outside, it might be a better value to boost your posts. Also, consider your sales cycle. If your customers respond best to offers versus branding messages, ads or promoted posts will deliver better ROI.
If you’re stuck deciding which way to go, feel free to reach out to us. Sometimes, a little outside perspective can be invaluable.
Organic Doesn't Mean Free:
Daniel Quentin Zuber
Co-Founder of 2113 Labs and influencer in trance music and EDM culture on Instagram @therealquentinZ.
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