Today, more consumers are becoming active in brand new and different platforms almost every other day. And it has become essential for marketers to diversify their marketing channels. It’s also vital for marketers now to decide where, when, and how they need to target their audience for optimum results.
From the Kodansha manga publishing house in Japan to the RareRoom virtual business store, entrepreneurs have started reorganizing their existing marketing strategies. They are even making room for incorporating new techniques to help them bring in a new audience to their sites.
While businesses start to work on choosing the best digital marketing strategies to rely on, they primarily encounter two main categories – paid and organic. And gathering sufficient knowledge about both these spheres allows marketers to know when to leverage one over the other. Therefore, in this article, we will discuss these two marketing forms in detail. So, let us see which technique is more suitable to follow.
What is organic marketing?
Organic marketing is also often referred to as Inbound marketing. In this marketing approach, the marketer relies upon word-of-mouth messaging to increase and promote a given brand. They use social media and online search engines to help share relevant content that remains targeted to a specific audience. The website’s audience gains from this strategy, referred to as organic traffic.
Surveys have revealed that approximately 51% of website traffic gets generated via organic searches. It’s also a fact that over 40% of the revenue generated is a consequence of organic traffic.
What are the goals of organic marketing?
The goals of organic marketing are:
- To educate the audience
- To optimize the content to get better search engine results
- To establish companies as thought leaders
- To build up long-term relations with customers
What are the tactics of organic marketing?
Organic marketing mainly relies upon creating content, including blog posts and landing pages, white papers, case studies, and even infographics. Digital marketers work to design and publish SEO content and use social media posts and email marketing to promote them.
What are the benefits of organic marketing?
Some of the essential benefits of organic marketing are:
- The sharing of information by brands at zero cost
- The audience feels the information to be more authentic compared to others since it seems not just a sales pitch but is rather informative, relevant, and valuable for them
What are the drawbacks of organic marketing?
It takes a considerable amount of effort, time, patience, and determination to create high-quality content to earn the trust of your customers. Thus, it will take you more time to reap the results of organic marketing practices, in stark contrast to paid marketing strategies.
What is paid marketing?
Just as the name suggests, in paid marketing, digital marketers have to make a given payment for the generation of online traffic to a particular website.
Generally, paid marketing tends to rely on the form of a billboard, poster, or even print advertisement. Nowadays, several digital marketers rely on paid marketing strategies to promote their brands and increase the traffic to their websites.
When it comes to paid marketing, marketers tend to fall back on paid ads, paid social media ads, sponsored posts, display ads, and several other tactics to generate more traffic on the given website.
What are the goals of paid marketing?
The goals of paid marketing are to achieve an efficient and solid return on investment faster than organic marketing. It is a process that includes the conversion of viewers to customers and meeting the sales goals that exist in a given time frame.
In this mode of marketing, marketers can track the conversion and engagement rates for every advertisement. It thereby helps them to measure the success of the paid marketing campaigns.
What are the tactics of paid marketing?
Paid marketing includes marketers distributing ads and sponsored posts on various social media platforms and search platforms. One of the most commonly used paid marketing tactics is pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. In this method, marketers need to pay the ad publisher each time a user clicks on the ad. When users land up on the designated website through an ad, such traffic refers to paid traffic.
What are the benefits of paid marketing?
Some of the essential benefits of paid marketing are:
- Brands can now reach a targeted audience more efficiently and directly than organic marketing.
- Greater online visibility of brands is now easy to generate seamlessly
- You no longer have to worry about search engine ranking once you optimize your keywords for the PPC campaigns alone
- It has a greater visual appeal to your target audience; hence, you can easily get your message across now!
What are the drawbacks of paid marketing?
While paid marketing can be immensely beneficial for your purpose, here are some drawbacks that you need to be aware of:
- Often your target audience might tend to ignore your paid marketing efforts, as they might think that the content feels forcibly imposed before them
- Paid marketing bores well as long as you keep your payments running on time. They would immediately stop appearing when you stop paying for your paid ad campaigns. Hence, your company needs to have a dedicated budget solely for paid marketing.
Organic vs. Paid Marketing Strategies – Which one to choose?
Paid marketing relies on several tools that can be helpful for you to micro-target your ideal audience, and reach might not have heard of your brand otherwise! While one of the marketing methods aims to attract the audience and increase brand awareness over time, the other aims to convert the audience to a designated campaign. Organic marketing is thus a method that can only generate traffic to your website over time, while paid marketing can bring in more audience to your website faster.
Though paid and organic marketing strategies might often seem to be opposing each other, they complement each other well. Often many companies rely on utilizing a fruitful combination of these two strategies to get an optimum result. For instance, businesses can work on posting and promoting their blog posts while using paid social media campaigns to drive more traffic.
While a group of marketers believes that businesses need to use organic marketing to a minimum degree, others feel that organic marketing helps create emotional relations with consumers.
Concluding Thoughts
Now you know the pros as well as cons of these two marketing strategies. Thus, as a digital marketer, you can utilize the most suitable technique to help your business scale new heights of success. You can even combine the best of the two and maximize your results! So, feel free to experiment, try something new in the process, and see where the outcome takes you.
Author Bio:
Aniya more is one of the brightest content writers at Breakout escape room. She is a passionate writer who loves to read books and explore different escape rooms. With a great work ethic, she spends most of her time researching and reading. When she is not working, she likes to relax with a cup of coffee and enjoy watching her favorite tv show or walking her dog peanut. You can find her on LinkedIn.