Many brands are all over the place in terms of how their paid ads and organic content sit alongside each other. Brands need to get them working better together, remove the silos, and think 'one social'. Paid ads can get you reach, but tend to be less like what people are there to watch. Organic content fits better with what people want to watch, but is often inconsistent in terms of reach, or too poorly branded, to make an impact on the brand. It’s why so much of the advertising effectiveness research suggests that ads and content need to be 'fit for platform' or ideally platform-native to start with. You need to work out how to get the 'best of both'. So it's interesting to see TikTok thinking about how paid and organic can work in harmony and be planned together better through the funnel (new report, link in comments).
this changed everything for us 1. boosting organic posts helped us build followership, which we could tie to future $ growth 1a. but the specific creative (obviously) essential. to your point "Organic content fits better with what people want to watch, but is inconsistent in terms of reach, or too poorly branded, to make an impact on the brand" We had to learn that 'going viral' was the wrong KPI, even though it feels great whenever it happens. why? we had the emotional impact, but no connection to the brand + the fact that we're ultimately a company that sells stuff (vs a meme acct). that connection was essential to drive long term base sales...BUT, that content had to get distribution 2. sadly, boosting posts (or putting organic content in conversion optimized campaigns) are generally not part of an evergreen strategy our lesson: once done consistently, it was a rising tide that lifted all boats 3. we got a $value for each engagement. getting that data changed everything. Why? We could still be 'data driven direct response performance marketers', optimized for a conversion that wasn't a purchase (brand response). this opened the world of building long term base sales to compliment short term activation Tom
Thanks for sharing. On my reading list! On a related note, when we advertise reels that are actually identical to our organic reels which always work well, we see 3-7 lower CPMs then what we would otherwise run as an ad (mixed placements though). They also bring loads of people to our IG profile. And we know pretty well how the quality of organic IG traffic stacks up to for instance paid search, and it doesn't disappoint at all.
It's always been weird to me that paid and organic social often sit in different departments. Shouldn't they work together?
It’s a really good point and question that isn’t often thought about and probably has the performance / brand challenge as well. The majority of organic social probably (sweeping generalisation) sits somewhere between brand building and digital shelf packaging, while a lot of social advertising that’s perceived to be effective - at least from a last click perspective - is heavily geared towards click and sell (e-commerce unknown brands notwithstanding). So performance specialists will pull in a different direction from social media specialists, who probably have a more natural leaning towards brand and both will have a very different definition of engagement. TikTok’s format and style has probably done more than most platforms to eliminate the gap between the two creatively, with Meta now catching up. I’m cautiously optimistic as to where this is going for creative as anything that builds consistency across teams is probably a good thing.
I just think brand gatekeepers haven’t adopted a creator mindset and are slightly confused about how to make content that drives storytelling and builds community.
Agreed. I like the approach of testing to understand engagement through organic and then promoting those top performers through paid
The cynical part of me says that the TikTok research on paid + organic is driven by the fact that TT ads aren't effective on their own. Having done a bunch of head to head tests of TikTok vs. Shorts I've seen the remain rate for ads on TikTok is shockingly low, (fun fact: a view is counted at less than 1 second) (vs. YT shorts counting a view at 10s). I'm obviously biased, but the data was pretty stark. You can look at the remain rate in the TikTok Ads dashboard to see what I mean. Most folks are swiping away within a second and even the top performing ads have a shockingly low remain rates at 5s https://ads.tiktok.com/business/creativecenter/inspiration/topads/pc/en?period=30®ion=US Happy to share the H2H test if it's of interest.
Total shocker that social platform says you should give us money and content to train our algo.
VP Brand Strategy at Jellyfish
6moSummary including link to download report https://www.tiktok.com/business/en-SG/blog/missions-for-the-modern-marketer