Organic Marketing vs Paid Marketing

Oh, how great it is to be a marketer in today’s information age. Each day, we compete for the attention and loyalty of consumers worldwide through a wide range of marketing tactics. 

This presents a challenge but an equally important opportunity. With seemingly endless ways for brands to bring attention to their products and services, what are the best ways to effectively attract an audience to our brand? 

In this article, we will discuss the difference between organic and paid marketing and how you can implement them into your business’s overall marketing strategy.

Keep it Natural: Organic Marketing

As the name aptly suggests, organic marketing (also known as inbound marketing) is a marketing strategy that focuses on attracting an audience through authentic means. If we refer to the sales funnel stages (awareness, interest, evaluation, engagement, and purchase), organic marketing targets the awareness phase. 

Organic marketing aims to grow brand awareness, build relationships, educate, and drive traffic with potential customers through content. Some common tactics include: 

• SEO 
• Blog writing
• Social media posts (i.e., Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook etc.)

Benefits

Organic marketing can be 100% free! You can do it at no cost to your brand or business and generate some tremendous traffic to your website for further conversion. 53% of B2B traffic comes from organic marketing.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges would be the amount of time it takes to see results. When you are dealing with search engines, they take months to rank your content, requiring a bit of patience. Nonetheless, at a minimum you should have some form of organic marketing in your overall marketing strategy.  

Paid Marketing

If you have ever been on YouTube, you have definitely seen an ad for the grooming tool MANSCAPED. For some, this may be a skip worthy ad, but behind it is a well thought out paid marketing campaign that leverages influencers and the power of platforms like YouTube to target their audience. 

When a business uses paid marketing, they are essentially paying to speak to their audience directly. Some modern-day examples include: 

• Social media ads
• Influencer Marketing
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Benefits

Paid marketing is a quick and effective method to engage with your target audience. You can now be more strategic and come directly to your consumer rather than waiting for them to stumble across your content. 

Challenge

There is a fine line between coming across as the “pushy salesperson” and genuine interest in your customers if you have too many ads. Your audience will tend to tune out in the digital marketing space if you solely focus on targeting them through paid marketing. 

How can I leverage these tactics? 

Now that you understand the value and importance of both methods, it is clear to see that they complement each other incredibly well.

Gary Vee writes in his best-selling book “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right hook” on the importance of providing helpful, value-driven content (the jab) before asking people to buy your product (the hook). Users will be much more willing to buy something from you if you give first before asking. 

In the context of organic and paid marketing, organic marketing represents the jab, while paid marketing is the hook.

When you implement these tactics into your business strategy, you give users the chance to get incredible value from your organic content while also being influenced to purchase something from your brand. 

Now is the chance to get out there! Talk to us about how we can help you with your organic and paid marketing.