Paid Marketing Versus Organic Marketing

Which is better paid marketing or organic marketing? While paid marketing is fast and scalable, it’s also expensive. So many online businesses will use both paid marketing and some organic marketing strategies alongside each other. Organic marketing can give you free traffic, leads and sales. However, with organic marketing it can take much longer to see the fruits of your labour. For example if you’re using blogging to build an online presence, you might be blogging for several months before your organic traffic starts to create traction.

With paid marketing, you see results almost immediately. So you can tweak and alter your marketing as you go. With organic, it’s slow so you won’t know exactly which actions are producing the best results until much later, (after you’ve done all that work!)

Paid Marketing Versus Organic Marketing

Depending on your particular circumstances and situation, you might want to choose either paid marketing or organic, or a combination of the two. With a large marketing budget you can spend some money testing and measuring a marketing campaign and quickly see which adverts produce the best results (and which ones don’t work as well). From this position, you can focus your money on the campaign (or campaigns) which brings about the best outcome.

Once you have found a profitable campaign you can cross test it with another (similar one). Then, focus on producing the most cost effective advertising campaign. A smaller budget will mean this will either take much longer or you’ll need to balance out your low marketing funds with an organic strategy such as blogging, video or social media marketing.

Organic marketing can give you sales without cost. However the cost is borne in the work done previously. SEO (search engine optimisation) can take months. In addition, Google can easily change it’s search algorithm and you can lose your ranking status even after a lot of work.

Paid Marketing Versus Organic Marketing – Diversifying Your Traffic Sources

Diversifying your traffic sources is therefore a good idea and it can be useful to do a combination of traffic generation strategies. Paid marketing is always going to cost money. Stop paying and your traffic stops immediately. Organic marketing can take time to get going, but once you have created content once, it can keep working for you – potentially for years without further input. However Google changes their algorithm frequently and often long standing websites can lose their rankings quickly overnight.

The answer is to diversify your traffic sources. Use a combination of both paid and organic marketing. Even on a low budget you can cap your marketing spend to make it viable for your situation. Here’s some of the main strategies which are used for traffic generation:

• Google Adwords
• Bing (Microsoft Ads)
• SEO – Search Engine Optimisation (organic search results)
• Link building – for SEO
• Content creation
• List building – puts you in greater control of your traffic

By diversifying your traffic streams, you will be less affected if any one of them is affected such as by:

• An ads account being suspended
• a Google algorithm update/drop in rankings
• a competitor taking the top spot for your main keywords

Use Email Marketing

If you don’t already you should definitely use an email marketing autoresponder. Autoresponders allow you to collect email addresses from your website and automate delivery of marketing messages. An autoresponder puts you in control of a traffic source (your email list) so you’re less reliant on other traffic sources such as paid ads or organic.

As you build trust with your email subscribers, you can send them useful information which can help them in some way. Over time, more of your subscribers should begin to trust you and therefore become more likely to purchase a product from you if it’s appropriate for their needs.

Before someone buys online they will usually do some of their own research around a product they might be interested in. Most online consumers don’t buy on their first contact with a new website/seller. They typically take 6-8 touch points before they will buy (unless it’s a familiar and trustworthy site such as Amazon).

This is where the power of email marketing comes in. Once you capture someone’s email address, you can follow up with an email marketing campaign which is designed to build trust and given them the information and security they need to buy from you.

Summary

So which is best paid marketing or organic marketing? Of course it all depends on your particular business model and your own personal circumstances. However, paid marketing is imminently faster and more scalable than organic marketing – which can take months before you see any progress.

Organic marketing is also less scalable and a lot of work can go to waste because you don’t know the effects of each small action. Blogging, for example can take months to come to fruition, but can lead to great results and give you leads and sales for free (once you’ve done the work first).

Paid marketing is fast. You can set up an advert and almost immediately see the results of your advert. You can also test and measure various campaigns before you start building your budget. With a profitable ad, you can add budget and scale easily. With organic marketing it’s much more difficult to scale.

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