Whether your business is based on an online business or not, you need digital marketing to not get a competitive advantage but to just stay relevant in this new digital age. There are of course two ways to do online marketing, organic and paid marketing. This blog is for you to decide which can yield you better results and what is suitable for your particular business/brand.
Weighing the choices between paid vs social media? Paid and organic growth are totally different in their own ways for various goals. Except for a holistic approach that balances awareness with conversion, it pays to understand the advantages and disadvantages of both. If you are new to Paid ads, 2022 is a motivating time to get started. Confinement throughout the pandemic had folks indulging in social media through a lot of ways, greatly increasing the quantity of individuals advertisers might reach.
The main goal of organic marketing is to increase brand awareness and build a connection with your audience, whether through educational or entertaining content. Of course, as a business, you’ll need multiple ways to attract leads and convert users. Organic marketing is just one way to do that (paid marketing is another, which we’ll dive into below).
With organic marketing, you can attract visitors to your site, who will hopefully convert to paid customers eventually. The goal is to keep your business top of mind when it comes time for a consumer to make purchasing decisions.
Additionally, organic marketing impacts your paid marketing efforts because if someone organically comes across your website, you can retarget them later with paid ads (on social media, search engines, etc.).
Organic Marketing Examples
Before we dive into the differences between organic and paid marketing, let’s look at some examples of organic marketing:
Unpaid social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Blog posts
Guest posts
User-generated content
Email newsletters
SEO
Online PR and link generation
YouTube
Paid marketing strategies include paid search ads, paid social media ads, sponsored posts, display ads, video ads on YouTube, etc. With paid media, you can micro-target your ideal audience and reach people who might never have heard of your business otherwise.
While organic marketing is more like word-of-mouth marketing, paid marketing is similar to sales-focused marketing. The goals for the two are very different. One is to attract audiences and increase brand awareness and the other is to convert audiences on a specific campaign
Benefits of Paid vs Organic Social Media
You’ll measure the success of paid marketing through returns in investment driving impressions, achieving high conversion rates, etc.
Now that we know more about the differences between organic and inorganic/paid marketing, let’s dive into how to build an organic marketing strategy.
The more you’ve grown your social presence organically, the more data you have about your ideal customer or audience. Where do they live? How old are they? What are they interested in? What problems are they facing in their lives? How are you helping them?
Capitalize on all this information as you build your ads. This is the place where all your hard work building quality relationships with your audience pays off.
With a unified overview of all social media activity, you can act fast to make data-informed adjustments to live campaigns (and get the most out of your budget). For example, if an ad is doing well on Facebook, you can adjust ad spend across other platforms to support it. On the same note, if a campaign is flopping, you can pause it and redistribute the budget.