Organic Vs Paid: The Ultimate Marketing Showdown
Are you overwhelmed by all the digital marketing tools at your disposal?
With all the various platforms, techniques and software available on the web, it’s no wonder you might be drowning in digital. I bet you have asked yourself “is it necessary to spend money on marketing when I can do so much for free?”
Let us break it down for you. The correct approach for targeting, reaching, engaging, and converting audiences are critical to your company’s growth. With the plethora of online platforms available today, determining where, when, and how to employ these many digital marketing tools at your disposal can be difficult. And, because all digital marketing methods fall into one of two categories; Organic and Paid, it’s very useful to understand how to use both to reach your business objectives.
Organic Marketing = FREE
Organic marketing is a content-based strategy that is used to increase brand awareness and strengthen relationships with customers. It is used by businesses to show their brand personality and tone, provide customer support and build relationships by sharing content that is useful, engaging and insightful. The cost lies in the creation of the content.
Benefits:
- Boosts your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Build customer loyalty within your existing audience
- Grow brand awareness and visibility
Examples:
- Create relevant content based around your keywords that represent what your brand offers and what your brand is. What words would your customer use to search for your business in Google?
- Unpaid social media posts, for example: image, video, image gallery and stories can be shared to friends and family to create brand awareness (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok)
- Blog Posts – you’re reading this right now because of a successful organic marketing campaign
- Email newsletters – create awareness of your latest blogs and news.
Paid Marketing = NOT FREE
When scrolling through social media or the first page of Google search results, we’ve all encountered sponsored posts or advertisements. This is paid marketing; it lets you target a specific audience that you haven’t reached before and hopefully convert their clicks into sales. To put it another way, you’re paying for the results. The cost lies not only in the creation of the content, but also the actual ad spend with the chosen platform.
Benefits:
- Generates leads and converts them into sales.
- Increases your followers and customers.
- Detailed Target Audience: Placing advertising where your target audience is already searching allows you to reach them more quickly and directly. Paid marketing has proven to be incredibly effective as more consumers have grown accustomed to purchasing products and services directly from social media platforms or search engine results.
Examples:
- Social media platform advertisements such as: Google, Facebook and Instagram ads. Each advert can have a specific goal, target audience and creative (carousel, single image and video)
- Influencer Marketing
- Pay-Per-Click Google Ads
Is it a must to implement both Organic and Paid Marketing into our marketing strategy?
After getting to know more about what both categories offer. We can all agree – the two go together like icing on a cupcake! Organic and Paid marketing compliment one other and, in many cases, function best when used in combination. However, it’s important to balance the two marketing tools in order to achieve the best ROI.
Do you need help to build a strategy to balance out Organic and Paid Marketing in order to get the results you want? Contact us today and let’s talk digital.
The author did a great job of presenting the pros and cons of both organic and paid marketing strategies in a clear and concise manner, which makes it a great resource for businesses looking to decide which approach to take. The use of real-life examples and statistics to illustrate the benefits of each strategy was also a nice touch that made the article all the more relatable. Overall, I highly recommend this article to anyone looking to improve their marketing efforts.
Thanks so much for the great feedback! Always fantastic to hear this from our readers.