Organic Marketing vs. Paid Marketing: A Game Plan
Organic and paid marketing work hand in hand by building a brand presence through social media and content and using targeted advertising to reach a larger audience faster.
In a digital era where the competition to capture consumers’ attention is fierce, many companies rely on a combination of two strategies: organic marketing and paid marketing. Understanding both approaches is crucial to knowing which method to use at any given time to yield the best results.
Organic marketing
Also known as inbound marketing, this strategy prioritizes outreach tactics that naturally increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your site without costing anything. It involves creating valuable and relevant content, optimizing the visibility of your website, and leveraging organic channels such as social media platforms, search engines, podcasts, and word-of-mouth messaging.
Advantages of organic marketing
Boosts credibility: By providing relevant and accurate information to your audience, you can set yourself up as a credible source of information. Once you establish rapport and trust, customers will be loyal to you and view your brand as an authority they can be confident in.
Budget friendly: Since you’re not paying for ads, you can invest your resources in producing great content that will effortlessly garner views. Social platforms are also free to use and allow you to connect with your audience as often as you want.
Sustainable growth: If you create valuable and timeless content, it will continue generating results and driving conversions for an extended period of time. Search engine optimization uses such content to improve how easy it is for relevant customers to find you, ensuring long-lasting traffic flow to your website. And people are much more likely to share content that resonates with them, extending your reach organically.
Builds community: Organic marketing fosters an emotional connection with your customers. As you interact with your audience, respond to their comments, and address their concerns, you cultivate a positive brand experience without the obstacle of needing to sell.
Drawbacks of organic marketing
Limited reach: Organic posts are only seen by your current audience, which means you are counting on them for sales and to share your content. You are also beholden to an algorithm that is constantly changing.
Time-consuming: Building a brand that people trust requires constant effort. You’ll need time to create content, engage with your audience, and optimize SEO. It can take anywhere from three to six months for your site to gain a foothold in search engines if you are publishing consistent and high-quality content (preferably at least one to three times a week).
How to start:
- Create a blog that consistently puts out quality, evergreen content.
- Produce SEO-driven content by using the highest-ranking keywords as well as longtail keywords, which are easier to rank for and may garner more engagement than short, general phrases. Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or those from Semrush can help you find words and metrics to optimize your website.
- In this age of TikToks and social media reels, videos are a great way to boost traffic. Create content geared toward your audience that is useful, timeless, and captivating.
- Interview an expert on your subject matter for your blog, video content, or podcast. This will lend credibility to your business while also expanding your reach.
Next steps: If your business is just getting going, organic marketing can be a great way to build a following. Encourage new customers to follow your social media pages, and always ask for their emails so you can make sure they receive information from you consistently.
Paid marketing
This method, also called outbound marketing, is focused on purchasing advertising on various channels to produce quicker results than organic marketing. Paid marketing can boost your reach, give you market insights, and help you target ideal prospective customers. Some investments might include search engine advertising, influencer partnerships, and social media ads.
Advantages of paid marketing
Extended reach: As social media platform algorithms have shifted, it’s become harder to have your content seen without paid advertisements, which guarantee a place in user feeds. Paid ads allow you to control factors like who sees your posts and dictate how much you spend per view, enabling you to tap into a whole new market of people without overextending your budget.
Immediate results: While organic marketing requires a major time commitment and consistent posting to be effective, paid marketing can give you fast results, especially if you are smart about tracking behavior and launching campaigns aimed at the right people. With a well-placed ad, you can start driving traffic to your website or landing pages immediately.
Targeted engagement: Paid marketing allows you to target by demographics, interests, and behavior. By homing in on the audience that is most likely to be interested, you have a better chance of converting them into customers.
Tangible analytics: Having access to data means you can see how successful your ad placements are and where your customers are engaging or not. You can also see trends and preferences to better tailor an ad or predict where it might do better.
Drawbacks of paid marketing
Higher cost: Perhaps the biggest drawback of paid marketing is that it requires a larger budget. Such advertising can quickly get expensive because you are charged for each click you receive without any guarantee of a sale or lead. This is especially burdensome for small businesses that don’t have much in the way of spare funds to invest.
No guarantee of ROI: Even with best practices in place, algorithms are fickle and can be an unpredictable factor in the success of your advertising. On top of that, competitors can make smart moves of their own that trump yours.
Short-term impact: Pay-per-click advertising requires setting a budget, and being dependent on continuous funding to make sales can lead to an unsustainable business model, especially if you’re in an industry with competitors who have much larger funds.
How to start:
- Try a smaller campaign first until you get a sense of the type of message that resonates with your customers.
- Create a strategy that includes both behavior-based and demographic-based targeting.
- Consider your target market when choosing a social media platform to use.
- Invest in influencers whose values match yours.
- Keep track of your results by using analytics tools.
Next steps: You want to make sure your paid efforts are worthwhile, so don’t neglect to follow up. Collect new leads that come in from your campaigns, and continue to reach out and gauge interest.
It’s important to understand the fundamentals of both types of marketing if you want to utilize them effectively. By optimizing the advantages of each and considering their drawbacks, you will be able to formulate a plan of attack that leverages your company’s best assets.
TAKE ACTION:
Determine which areas of these plans would work best for your business, and implement one organic and one paid marketing campaign into your strategy.