Many marketers know that integrating your paid and organic social efforts are integral to the success of your brand, but what many are not aware of is the power that comes with including influencer marketing in the mix. Paid social has a large arsenal of targeting options, various ad formats to choose from and is a great tool across all stages of the marketing funnel. Organic social can be equally powerful – allowing you to build an engaged community, drive deeper conversation and extract insights about your brand from loyal customers. Naturally, integrating these two strategies makes sense, but what about when you incorporate influencer marketing? What are the benefits and opportunities of this trifecta? Below are three reasons you want to weave these three strategies together for your brand.

1. Each strategy makes up for what the others lack. Though paid social helps to reach new audiences and can assist in boosting sales, organic social allows you to focus on improving engagement, brand favorability and customer service. Influencer marketing, on the other hand, can accomplish all of these things. Influencers use their loyal following and word of mouth to promote brand awareness, promotions, products and giveaways, and their content can even be supported by paid dollars to help boost it to a wider audience. They also engage directly with their followers, so their authenticity lends to increased brand trust and positive sentiment.

2. It will make you more confident in your ROI. According to Hootsuite’s Social Trends 2022 report, more than 35% of marketers have completely integrated their paid and organic strategies. So, why not also factor in influencers? With the ability to incorporate tracking URLs in almost every digital tactic, it would stand to reason that you’d be more confident in your ability to prove your ROI. You can see how each tactic supports the other, where and how users are interacting with your content, and even set up attribution modeling. Beyond proving ROI, this can also be helpful in asking for bigger budgets or planning future social efforts.

3. Influencers can bolster your content strategy. Though organic and paid content is typically planned out for the year via editorial calendars or media planning, influencers can fill in any content gaps you might experience. Influencer content is typically unscripted, so it comes off as less of a “brand-oriented message” and more one of authenticity, which can add depth and realism to your content. Moreover, influencer and organic efforts can be used to collect user-generated content, which can be repurposed for brand use if given permission.

Integrating all three strategies is the key to social media marketing success, but make sure to have a comprehensive plan in place that leverages the individual strengths of each. It’s likely your year-over-year learnings will help to inform future strategy, which will allow you to pivot effectively and efficiently, maximizing your marketing dollars.