Blog What’s the Strategic Difference Between Paid and Organic Social Content?

What’s the Strategic Difference Between Paid and Organic Social Content?

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AUTHOR: Cecily Moore

Apr 09, 2024

14 Min Read

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Have you ever sat down to create content and wondered, can this be used for paid ads? Or, what’s the difference between organic and paid content, anyway? Well, we’ve got the deets and worthwhile inspiration to set the record straight on how, when, and why you might create different content for your paid and organic content strategies.

And no matter whether you’re a social media manager or a marketing director (or both—we know arts marketers wear a lot of hats!), content is essential to your marketing strategy. Organic content is still important, but its reach has been on the decline for years—did you know only .07% of Facebook fans interact with a page’s organic content, despite Facebook being the most-used social platform? Or that only 40% of social media managers believe paid campaigns yield a more effective ROI than organic? It’s time to level up your digital strategy.

What we’ll cover:

Paid Content

An Overview of Paid Content

Stellar Paid Content Examples

Identifying Your Audience for Paid Content

Ideas for Creating Paid Content that Converts

Organic Content

An Overview of Organic Content

Ideas for creating organic content that delights, with examples

Ideas for creating organic content that sells

Getting Started

4 Questions to Connect with Audiences

Paid vs. Organic: Both Matter, But When?

The largest distinction between creating organic and paid content is who you’re talking to and what your key performance indicators (KPIs) are. Whether your content is organic or paid informs the types of messaging and storytelling you include because you’re looking to achieve different results.

When Paid Content Matters

For Paid Content, you need to be crafting content that is rich in storytelling and brand presence because:

1. You will reach new viewers.
Audiences that aren’t yet familiar with your brand and values will likely resonate more with the programming, artists, or activities your organization has than your organization itself (they don’t know you yet, after all!). It’s crucial to highlight these elements front and center with storytelling—both within your creative and copy. Storytelling throughout your creative helps you highlight the unique value an offering brings to audiences’ lives or the unique experience audiences can look forward to at your organization.
2. These viewers need a reason to care—fast.
You need to pack paid content with reasons new folks should pay attention and take action (a.k.a. convert!). Remember, there’s a lot of content vying for their attention, and cutting through the noise is key. You have a landing page for all the pertinent details, so make sure your paid content highlights a unique angle or benefit that is going to drive an instant emotional connection with audiences.

For these reasons, effective paid content is often flashier, more time-intensive to create, and includes unique points of view that will resonate with different subsets of audiences. This may look like trailers with storytelling, dynamic carousels that educate audiences about an offering, brand awareness or experiential videos, and more.

See It In Action: Stellar Paid Content

CI offers Content Strategy services in which we partner with arts and culture organizations to deliver expert creative direction, design, copywriting, and holistic strategy support for promoted campaigns. Here are a few standouts we created for paid campaigns that effectively show new audiences why they should care:

Theatre Fine Arts Orchestra

Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival

Why it works: This post does a great job of highlighting one of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s most unique value propositions—theater in the great outdoors! In addition, it amps up social proof by highlighting a range of audience testimonials paired with exciting production photography.

The Art League

Why it works: When it comes to selling classes, it’s key to put your audience’s goals front and center. This video post does a great job of highlighting the aspirational aspects (read: benefits) of taking an art class with The Art League in a striking, visual way.

National Symphony Orchestra

Why it works: This post puts the emotion front and center! By showcasing the power of live music through what the audience will experience, viewers can envision what their night with the National Symphony Orchestra will feel like. In addition, leveraging evergreen visuals that position this in D.C. at The Kennedy Center helps to amp up familiarity for local audiences as well.

What about User-Generated Content (UGC)?

UGC or other paid content that doesn’t “look like an ad” (like this one!) can also be an effective creative style because it blends more into feeds, meaning it could clock a few extra seconds of watch time. Still, consider how infusing brand presence into these styles can increase recall for those ‘new to you’ audiences because most customers need to see a brand at least 7 times before purchasing. This could be as simple as ensuring captions and overlays utilize your brand colors and fonts.

Tailor Paid Content For Your Audience—And Your Marketing Funnel

New Audiences (Top of Funnel)

Suggested KPI: Key Page Views

The examples above are largely strategies that are going to create your best “Top of Funnel (ToF)” or “Acquisition” content. The goal of this content is to grab viewers’ interest and drive them to the landing page to learn more. These folks are new to your organization—just starting to enter your marketing funnel—and may require more time or messaging to turn them into purchasers. Once you capture their interest and drive them to the landing page, they’ll move down your funnel to be retargeted for those follow-up messages.

Those PREVIOUSLY ENGAGED (Bottom of Funnel)

Suggested KPI: Conversions (a.k.a. Sales)

For “Bottom of Funnel (BoF)” content—the content you create for those folks who are familiar with your brand—you have an opportunity to dive deeper with your content because they may not need as much additional context about who you are and what you do.

This type of content has the opportunity to connect with audiences by:

Developing a deeper emotional connection
Making them feel special
Expanding further into why this particular thing will bring value to their lives.

Pro Tip: Keep in mind that any ToF audiences that engage with your ad are likely to receive your BoF content too, so your messages for these segments should complement each other, but offer unique insights.

Translating The Funnel Into Paid Content Ideas

Let’s say your organization is presenting a Shakespeare play. Here are some ways in which you can frame these two types of paid content:

Paid Content

If your potential audience is Shakespeare:

Top of Funnel

💡 Idea: You could leverage a popular direct quote from Shakespeare’s work, either as a graphic overlay on your visual asset or as a headline in your post caption.

Why it works: Someone who loves Shakespeare will instantly recognize and gravitate toward the Bard’s words. Once you stop them in their tracks with something they’re familiar with, it’s important to translate the additional, unique benefit to them that your production offers. Ask yourself why your production is unique, and share that with your audience to help contextualize their passion for Shakespeare into a can’t-miss experience at your organization.

Bottom of Funnel

💡 Idea: You could interview the director about how they translated Shakespeare’s work for this production.

Why it works: Someone familiar with your organization is more likely to know and care about the director—hearing from them will feel personal and relevant! Furthermore, because this person is interested in Shakespeare, the director’s expertise on that subject matter creates a unique opportunity to dive deeper into the work with education and insight which will help this audience member feel even more connected to something they already love.

Paid Content

If your potential audience interest is live theater:

Top of Funnel

💡 Idea: You could create a video trailer showing off the audience experience of attending a live production, pairing experiential video with production video of this particular work.

Why it works: Someone who loves live theater is invested in the communal experience, so pairing evergreen video showcasing a joyful theater experience helps them envision how their night out at your organization would be. This is about selling the overall experience, and pairing that framing with exciting production video helps to drive interest in why they should see this production right now.

Pro Tip: Experiential footage can be remixed and used again, so it’s worth investing in.

Bottom of Funnel

💡 Idea: Ask one of your actors to give a behind-the-scenes glimpse into what a day of putting on your production looks like.

Why it works: Behind-the-scenes content showcases the art of theater-making. Someone who loves live theater is interested in seeing how it comes to be, not just the result! Showing audiences the in-progress work on your production is perfect for audiences already familiar with the high-caliber nature of your theater experience. Therefore, this content can be more casual and doesn’t need to be as shiny and polished as your top-of-funnel content.

When Organic Content Matters

Now that we’ve got a solid grip on the paid side of things, let’s dive into organic content. For organic content strategy, you likely adopt the 70/30 organic content rule:

70% of the time: Deepen your relationships with your existing audiences

30% of the time: Sell to these audiences.

A Deep Dive into 70% content

Your 70% content can be divided into two types of content:

The content that will deepen your relationships with existing fans.
Content that will attract new audiences that don’t follow you yet, but are aligned with your organization’s offerings, point of view, and values.

Let’s break down how you can leverage these two types of organic content and what KPIs you should be focusing on.

Organic Content

Goal: Deepen Audience Relationships

Suggested KPI: Engagements and Shares

What: For deepening relationships with existing audiences, you’ll want to lean into exclusive content, be it behind-the-scenes content, team spotlights, or talent spotlights.

Why: People want to feel like they’re in the know, so it’s important to pull back the curtain and shine a spotlight on the how and why of your organization. You can also leverage content that builds trust and shows off the community you’re building through social proof.

💡 Creative: Great types of content for building trust and community are UGC from your existing audiences and sharing press coverage and reviews, or other buzzworthy ways people talk about your organization.

Organic Content

Goal: Attract New Audiences

Suggested KPI: Reach and Follows; Engagement and Shares

What: To attract new audiences, you’re going to want to craft shareable content that has a strong point of view—the goal isn’t to be for everyone, it is to be for your people. Think about the range of interests your potential audiences would have, what current events they’re responding to, and how their values, interests, or how they view the world aligns with your organization and craft shareable content around those themes.

Why: The goal of these posts is to delight audiences. Ensure that this content is timely and relevant for them.

💡 Creative: Try creating a meme of a current event, share your take on an upcoming holiday, get at the core of your shared interest with a fascinating fact or statistic about your industry, or share your hot take on a disputed subject matter.

See It In Action: Stellar Organic Content

Art Museum Performing Arts Ballet

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Why it works: Minneapolis Institute of Art fans will love getting nerdy over this playful quiz! It takes some true insider knowledge to get the answers to this quiz right, but anyone can play along for fun! This post offers a fun and unique way for followers to show off their knowledge while building both community and engagement—a win-win.

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts

Why it works: Lincoln Center puts audiences front and center with a thank you for participating while reminiscing about incredible events visitors experienced all summer long. This is a great way to uplift your community, and this post does that in spades. It’s a great balance of celebrating achievements and the people who made them extra special—the audiences, artists, and staff!

Kansas City Ballet

Why it works: Your organic feed is the perfect place to talk about timely and relevant events, and Kansas City Ballet took this to new heights with their recent Superbowl content! This example is pure delight—showcasing their talents in a fun, upbeat, and approachable way that grabs attention and ties back to current events that are relevant to their organization.

Pro Tip: Struggling to stay inspired? Download the Social Media Content Calendar for Arts Marketers! It’s free and chock-full of daily and monthly holidays, artist birthdays, and other ideas to keep your content wheels turning and even drive revenue—after all, 90% of consumers buy from brands they follow on social.

And Don’t Forget Your 30% Content!

Suggested KPIs: Indicators of sales interest, like clicks (on post or link in bio), saves, and traffic to your landing page

With 70% of organic content in your strategy that engages, delights and informs, you’ve now earned the right to sell to your audiences with the remaining 30% of your organic content.

What: Your 30% content is where you move the needle on conversions in your organic strategy.

Why: This content further educates your fans about your offerings and explicitly asks for the sale, donation, or other action with a clear and concise call to action.

While this content can be the same or similar to your BoF paid content, it’s important to remember that your organic audiences include your nearest and dearest fans. It’s worth leaning into special opportunities and even more detail with them!

💡 Creative: Look for unique ways to educate, inspire, and emotionally connect with audiences through content, like having a personal video invitation from an artist to buy tickets or a post that dives even deeper into the process of making the art with a designer on your staff.

Pro Tip:

The simple act of incorporating a call to action makes it 30% content, but that doesn’t mean this content should only ask for the sale. Be sure to sprinkle in what audiences want from social in every post: delight, education, and/or connection. Don’t miss your chance with this content to highlight the unique value you’re offering, and the benefit it will bring to your audience.

get started

4 Questions to Connect with Audiences

To make the most of your content at every stage of the funnel, tailor your approach and make sure you’re identifying who you want to connect with and what the goal (or KPI) of that content is. This will ensure that strategic, thoughtful content goes out into the world and you’ll be even closer to reaching your goals!

Remember, you should always ask yourself these guiding questions to steer your content creation process:

1. Who am I talking to?
2. What is the purpose of this content?
3. Why should they care about my content?
4. What unique value does my offer bring to their lives?

Use the answers to quickly assess which type of content approach will best serve the result you’re hoping for, whether that’s building your community, increasing engagement, or making those sales!