Again, interesting insights from Daniel Hochuli of LinkedIn.
Many brands only do organic posting on their brand campaigns and save their paid budget for lead gen campaigns.
Perhaps it should be flipped?
Organic posted content originally goes to your followers, an audience who’s already aware you exist and probably already a customer. It seems like a waste of marketing resources to use organic distribution for branding, especially if awareness is an objective because the first audience who sees it are already aware of your brand. Context on who sees the content matters.
Indeed, organic posting doesn’t really impact awareness, nor increase your reach or salience significantly unless your content goes viral (which is unlikely).
If organic is ineffective at brand building. Is the paid alternative better? Yes, it is, but even with paid, a lot depends on how you target.
Brand campaigns need to hit as many people as possible to build awareness, salience and fame. This means targeting very broad. Like ‘out-of-market’ audience broad. Seems counter-intuitive to target people not in the market to buy now, but famous brands are excellent at reaching their TAM. And effective eSOV includes addressing the whole market.
In short, if you are doing branding on social media, paid distribution is better for upper funnel objectives.