If you have clicked on this headline, you likely want to increase your leads through social media, and other online platforms – and are wondering what works best for your business between organic posting and paid marketing. It is also likely that you have a limited marketing budget, and want to make the best out of what you have. 

In that case, let us make your job easier and tell you that your approach needs to be a mix of both paid and organic marketing, to achieve the best results for your business. 

Before getting into the why let us differentiate between organic and paid marketing. 

Organic marketing involves directing traffic to companies’ websites through educational and engaging content like blogs, unpaid social media posts, Facebook updates, tweets, case studies, guest posts, guest blogs etc. Organic marketing leverages SEO, social media, and other media channels to build an audience for brands.

On the other hand, paid marketing is about quick conversions. With strategies like Youtube Ads, Social Media Ads, Sponsored Posts, Display Ads, and other forms of paid ad campaigns, paid marketing aims at reaching your target audience (who may likely have never heard about your company) and converting them into loyal customers at a short notice. 

Thus, organic marketing plays the long game to establish a brand on social media, while paid marketing is for micro-targeting a specific audience to boost lead generation. 

Organic and paid marketing differ in their purposes and approaches – organic marketing focuses on building brand awareness and paid marketing is more concerned with increasing sales. 

However, in the broader picture, their objective remains the same, which is to attract people to the brand.

Deciding between employing organic marketing vs. employing paid marketing is not a question of “either-or”, but what your company needs and when. To understand that, you need to first understand the advantages organic marketing has over paid marketing and vice versa. 

Here are the advantages of organic marketing over paid marketing: 

• Organic marketing is less expensive than paid marketing, as all it takes to do it effectively is an understanding of SEO and Social Media Algorithms. While companies need to invest money and resources in creating content, it is a meager investment with guaranteed returns. Moreover, this cost is less than the paid marketing budgets of companies.

• Organic marketing has farther-reaching effects than paid marketing, and a longer-lasting impact. Brands can create enduring content that continues to dominate search engines, social media algorithms, and audience consciousness even after a significant time of posting. On the other hand, paid marketing works only as long as you pay for it. 

• Organic marketing is better for nurturing audiences into becoming long-time brand advocates by providing them with educational, insightful, and engaging content in a periodical manner – no one ignores blogs and social media posts like they ignore banner ads, do they?

Now, let’s take a look at the advantages of paid marketing over organic marketing:

• Paid marketing helps companies build brand awareness from scratch. It is reported that 49% of users who use Google to look for things find new things (which they didn’t originally set out to look for). With paid marketing, you can find and reach your target audience easily. 

• With paid marketing, it is easier to track where sales are coming from. Google Analytics lets companies see who and how many people clicked on what ads, and how many of those people converted. This also makes ROI measurements pretty straightforward. 

• Paid ads are quick and simple to set up. That is not to argue that creating and maintaining great digital marketing ad campaigns is simple. However, the tools available on Google AdWords, Facebook, Instagram, and other ad platforms make it incredibly simple to get started and earn impressions across devices.

• Paid marketing is simple to integrate into organic social media marketing, email marketing, organic search marketing, and other marketing strategies. This means you can enhance your organic marketing efforts with paid ads.

With the benefits of both organic and paid marketing laid in front of your eyes, it would be easier to integrate both into your marketing endeavors. 

Organic marketing and paid marketing are like two distinct pieces in a puzzle – that fit well with each other. Your company needs to find the right balance between both strategies to get the maximum ROI.

The Go-To-Guy! is an end-to-end brand marketing agency based out of Hyderabad, India. We give companies efficient marketing strategies that balance organic vs paid marketing activities in a complementary manner. 

About The Go-To Guy!

The Go-To Guy! is a creative branding and marketing agency that builds memorable brand identities, activates online presence, and brings brand engagement to help companies grow online, offline, and across multiple platforms