Organic Marketing vs. Paid Marketing

Given the competition in the business industry today, you have to market your products to your target population using various strategies. Before picking your desired technique, you need to understand the nature of your consumers. While some customers need time to convert through engagement, others can be converted without brand awareness.

As a result, there are two ways to reach your target customer; organic means or through paid campaigns. This detailed post will talk about the two marketing strategies.

We will discuss organic marketing vs. paid marketing, their benefits, costs, and differences between organic and paid marketing. Read on…

What is Organic Marketing?

Organic marketing, also known as inbound marketing, focuses on rankings on search engines and creating brand awareness. For example, you may use keywords to create an informational blog about a product to let people understand the product more in-depth. You can then use free mediums such as social media platforms or blogs to share it.

The main goal of organic marketing is to draw traffic to your website, increase brand awareness and build strong connections with the audience. In the example above, writing a blog about a product educates the audience. An interested consumer would take the information and later visit the company's website to either buy or check out the product.

The strategy is referred to as "organic" because it happens without coercing the audience. The audience reads a post of their own free will, usually not an advertisement, then takes action later. In most cases, organic marketing occurs when a consumer is in an inquiring stage. Consumers utilise a search engine when they are interested in knowing more about a product or service.

With that said, as a marketer, you need to know how to utilise organic marketing. This strategy will require you to answer questions that consumers would ask. For instance, you can talk about a product's use and its side effects. Most marketers would not want to disclose the side effects of a product. However, failure might result in product deception.

Organic Marketing Strategy

Organic marketing strategy involves these four essential steps:

1. Analysing the Current Traffic Habits

You need to understand customers' traffic habits. Where does your target customer spend the most time online? And how do you get the most traffic? Blog, YouTube, or Facebook? Identifying your target audience's current trends and the medium that gives you the highest organic traffic will improve your marketing campaign.

For instance, compare your YouTube to your blog post traffic to understand what your audience needs. From there, you need to post more often on the platform that is likely to generate more traffic.

2. Content Creation

Create content that resonates with your audience. Brainstorm the content type and ideas to focus on for better results. This could be blogging, emails, or case studies. You can do keyword research and create content that will inform your readers.

While writing content, ensure you touch on your audiences' pain points. By solving people's problems, you endear your brand to the clients.

3. Optimising Your Content

The only way to acquire organic traffic is to make your content be found on search engines and social media platforms. As such, you need to incorporate keywords in your content while ensuring that the output is attractive to your audience.

Find keywords that your target customers search for and use them strategically in your content. Also, you can use metadata to help search engines know what your content entails, thereby improving the chances of ranking on search engines.

4. Evaluate and Improve

You have to test whether your chosen format or content is what your audience needs. There is always room for improvement, and you get better each day by evaluating your strategy and trying the best practices.

Examples of Organic Marketing

• Improving your SEO
• Posting ads on your YouTube channel
• Online PR
• Creating consistent content in blogs
• Managing and maintaining social media accounts
• Reinventing your user interface
• Building and utilising your email list
• Unpaid social media posts

Benefits and Costs of Organic Marketing

Before implementing a marketing strategy, you need to weigh its costs and benefits. Below are the costs and benefits of organic marketing.

Benefits of Organic Marketing

• Permanent traffic: When an article or a blog is well-written, there is a high probability of attracting a large audience. The audience may then visit the company's website and provide permanent traffic associated with product promotion.
• Builds consumers' trust and confidence: In most cases, organic marketing involves educating the audience on anything they need to know about a product or service. By disclosing essential information, your audience will trust you. It will also make it easier for them to visit your website without any coercion. While building consumers' trust, you get to build your brand resulting in brand loyalty.
• Lower costs: Organic marketing is not costly in most cases. The strategy offers a free source of traffic.

Costs of Organic Marketing

• Time-consuming: It may take weeks or months for search engines to rank your article. It means that you may have the best content that people might see months later.
• Requires a lot of effort: You will put in a lot of work to create content that appeals to a large audience. Some companies hire professional writers as blogs need a lot of research to content that gives you results.

Measures of Organic Marketing Success

Below are a few elements that you'll need to track to know whether your strategy is successful:

• Traffic: This is the number of times users visit your website. It is a common way to measure how much your business is attracting the audience.
• Organic traffic: It measures how well the SEO is working.
• Formats: Formats measure which platform (social media, email, or blog) generates the highest traffic.
• Leads or sales: This measures the number of sales resulting from your chosen format. You can compare how much sales you made through blogs or social media platforms.

What is paid marketing?

Just as it sounds, paid marketing involves buying traffics for a website rather than earning it "organically." The goal of paid marketing is to convert viewers to customers. A company can use social media advertising to buy online advertising that reaches the target audience immediately.

Most companies use pay-per-click platforms such as Google Ads, which is an easy way of getting consumers. You don't have to wait for your target audience to find your article then later visit your website. Your ad will appear from where the visitor can purchase your product or service. Return on ad spend (ROAS) measures the success of paid marketing.

Benefits and Costs of Paid Marketing

Again, you have to weigh the costs and benefits of the marketing strategy of your choice before implementation. Paid marketing seems like the best option because we all want quick results, but you need to research everything about it to determine if it works for you.

Below are the costs and benefits of paid marketing.

Benefits of Paid Marketing

• Quick results: As soon as an ad is created and published, traffic starts coming to your website. More people will likely know about your product within a short time.
• No limit: This is beneficial to companies that have huge advertising budgets. You can buy as much traffic as you want.
• No time limit: You can buy traffic at any time you want. The benefit applies to both large and small organisations.
• Direct advertising: Paid marketing provides companies with online advertising services that advertise your product directly to your audience.

Costs of Paid Marketing

• Requires a big budget: If you want a lot of traffic, you have to invest heavily in paid marketing. For small organisations, this might consume a lot of funds.
• Unstable traffic: You only get the traffic if you pay for it. If you stop paying for the ads, your traffic will decline or completely stop.
• Inauthentic: For most paid ads, coercion is involved in attracting an audience. For that reason, many consumers usually ignore paid ads on search engines and social media platforms. Additionally, the popularity of paid marketing has resulted in a saturated marketing field as companies compete for ads.

Examples of Paid Marketing

• Influencer marketing: It happens when an organisation pays an influencer to advertise its products. Some of these influencers become the company's brand ambassadors.
• Social media ads: Organisations post Ads on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
• Pay-per-click (PPC): You pay for the traffic you get from keywords that you selected.

If you are using pay-per-click campaigns already and you are wondering if they could perform better, or if you are thinking of starting PPC ads and you'd like to know what return on investment you could achieve, use our interactive calculator.

The Differences between Organic and Paid Marketing

1. Mode of communication

The main difference between organic and paid marketing concerns the mode of communication for the two strategies. With organic marketing, the content posted attracts and entices the audience to visit your website.

On the other hand, paid marketing comes off as a forceful means to pass a message to the audience. For instance, some ads pop up or other flashing visuals that appear while using an application and, you can only proceed using the app after the ad ends.

2. Cost

Cost is another differentiating element. Organic marketing is usually the free, educational content that earns traffic. Additionally, since organic marketing is free, your content builds up over time, and you start seeing its benefits later.

However, for paid marketing, you have to buy traffic. It means that companies with huge budgets are likely to benefit more from paid marketing than companies with limited budgets.

Combining Organic and Paid Marketing

Regardless of the differences between paid and organic marketing, an organisation can utilise the two strategies for the best results. You can put out content in blogs and still buy traffic to make your product known to a vast audience.

Understanding both organic and paid marketing could play a significant role in complementing the strategies. For instance, depending on your marketing goal, you can decide which strategy to use. Essentially, this means you've to understand your target audience, the accessibility, and the convenience of the technique you intend to use before putting it into practice.

You can use organic marketing to build your brand for permanent traffic. However, since this will take longer before noticing its benefits, you can complement it with paid marketing for quicker results.

Tips

Why use one marketing strategy when you can use both to get maximum benefits? Here are a few tips to benefit from both strategies.

• Do not pay for all ads. You can selectively pay for ads that will push you to achieve your business goals.
• You should identify content that resonates with your audience. Post such content through organic marketing to reach your loyal consumers and, pay for an ad to get potential customers.
• Learn what your consumers need and, that will help you come up with excellent content.
• Test the effectiveness of your marketing strategy by running versions of the ads through a smaller audience.
• To stay connected to your organic audience, use retargeting ads.
• Conduct research about marketing each time you advertise your product. The process will help you know the needs of your potential consumers.

Conclusion

Whether you have a small or large business, you need to educate yourself on organic and paid marketing. These strategies come in handy and could be the determining factor to the success of the organisation.

In today's business environment, you need to harness the best of both marketing worlds to increase your business's success. You should complement organic and paid marketing to get a huge audience to convert to customers. However, you need to understand both campaigns' goals, benefits, and costs before using them.