…and why the need to be friends.

Social Media is an excellent tool for connecting with customers and increasing brand exposure. In order to access its full potential, there will be times when you need to promote your content beyond your organic abilities. Given Facebook’s News Feed algorithm and the sheer number of tweets sent every minute (1,000), your most engaging content can easily get lost in the mix. This is where paid social comes in to save the day. The key to a successful paid media campaign is to layer it on top of your organic efforts. As Larry Kim of WordStream puts it, you need to “find your unicorn”.

What’s a unicorn? As Larry explains, a unicorn is a piece of organic content that performs well without paid’s assistance. There isn’t a way to know for sure that your post/tweet/pin/etc. is highly engaging unless you use it organically first. To do this, you need a robust and active social media campaign that posts a variety of content daily. Once you discover your unicorn content, you can then promote it strategically through your chosen platform’s targeting capabilities. Using this strategy prevents wasted ad spend on low-quality content and unqualified audiences.

However, this is not where the story ends. Once you’ve found and promoted your unicorn, you can then create a remarketing list comprised of people who engaged with your content via a social media platform. Those remarketing lists can then be used as targeting for your AdWords campaigns. If you’re worried that some of the people on that remarketing list may not be qualified leads, you can add additional targeting layers on top of the list. For example, you can add geo-targeting and household income layers to only target people who engaged with your content that are located in New York City, and have an annual household income greater $100,000.

What you’re left with is a targeted list of highly qualified users to target your ads to, likely at a lower Cost per Click and Cost per Conversion. None of this could be possible without first having an active organic social media campaign. The two marketing channels (paid media and social media) need to work closely together so that unicorn content can be promptly promoted to a qualified audience.

How closely should they work together?

Sitting within two feet of each other seems to be working well for us.

They even arrange for doggie playdates outside of work!