Why organic social and digital marketing content are like eyebrows: sisters, not twins
It sounds like a weird analogy but hear me out! Digital marketing content and organic social content are often viewed interchangeably in the non-profit & charity sectors, badged together under a broad ‘social’ or ‘digital’ umbrella. But like eyebrows, they’re not a matching pair: they’re complementary, not identical, and each one needs a tailored approach to get the best out of it.
Working (usually) with smaller teams and tighter resources in the sector, I understand why it’s appealing to consolidate the copy & image assets for two types of content that superficially seem quite similar. More often than not, though, the audience, objectives and expectations can be quite different, which is why it doesn’t always make sense to recycle the same copy and image assets for both things.
Tailoring social content specifically for either marketing or organic purposes - whilst inevitably more resource intensive - is going to make each format more effective. For paid marketing, this means higher quality and less costly engagement.
Here are the questions I ask to decide whether using the same content approach for organic social and digital marketing is going to be effective.
1 - Do they have the same audience?
At Wellcome, we usually use our marketing content to reach new or ‘colder’ audiences. Our organic social content, on the other hand, is for reaching people who are more familiar with our work: after all, they’re already engaged enough to be following us. Our organic content can therefore take for granted some assumed knowledge that our digital marketing content can’t: who we are, what we do, and our credibility in health & science.
In general, different audiences call for different content approaches. Whilst here we’re looking very broadly at organic and marketing content, it’s possible to take a much more granular approach. On the organic side for example, you might know that your audience on Twitter is different to the people who follow your Facebook page, and so tailor your posts by platform. For digital marketing, in addition to tailoring by platform, you might use a different image and copy set for different audience segments, or perhaps even try out a number of different creative variants per audience segment as part of a test & learn approach.
2 - Do they have the same objective?
Linked to the audience is the objective: what do we want our audience to do, think or feel? With our more engaged and ‘sympathetic’ organic audience, we have the opportunity to go into greater detail or nuance on more complex and/or contentious topics. For marketing content on the other hand, we might have a more specific objective in mind and so it makes sense to tailor our content to that objective - especially if that’s how we’re going to be measuring performance. Again, different objectives would indicate a need for different content approaches.
3 - What are the internal expectations for this content?
This sounds innocuous but it’s actually such an important question: if digital marketing isn’t (yet) well understood in your organisation, the assumption might be that it’s similar to the organic content that non-profits and charities are often more familiar with. After all, it’s digital and it’s content - so what’s the big difference?
Building internal understanding and capability of digital content might look like:
Recognising different types of digital content;
Consensus for what the the content is expected to achieve;
Uniting around an integrated campaign strategy, which incorporates digital as part of a broader content strategy.
Coming full circle on the eyebrow analogy (!): organic social and digital marketing content have more in common than differences. It’s important to think about how each one can be optimised, but also how they’ll work together as part of a holistic omnichannel approach.
