When you create a digital marketing strategy, you can focus either on organic or paid marketing. But before you do, take a look at how they vary including their advantages, disadvantages, and how to determine which one you should prioritize.
Organic vs paid digital marketing: Understanding the basics
Organic marketing involves utilizing strategies that attract your target audience naturally or organically. An organic marketing strategy involves educating your target audience, showcasing industry expertise, and highlighting USPs.
When you adopt an organic marketing strategy, you typically post blogs, employee/customer testimonials, case studies, collaborate with industry experts/influencers, and issue regular updates on social media platforms. Tools like email marketing, social media marketing and SEO also contribute to organic marketing efforts.
Paid marketing, also known as digital advertising, involves using paid media/methods to address your target audience precisely, and convert quickly. Here, you are required to select your advertising platform, the keywords you want to focus on, the timeframe for which you want to advertise and of course, your budget.
What are the benefits of organic and paid digital marketing?
Even though it offers results in the long run, one of the biggest advantages of an organic marketing strategy is that it is cost-effective. You can get started without spending excessively, whether you’re building /optimizing a website, creating blogs, or engaging via social media platforms. When you work on it consistently, the way in which organic marketing benefits you is that it builds presence on SERP and generates interest in your brand. Besides, in the long run it draws more and more traffic to your organization.
On the other hand, paid marketing requires you to spend, but it is cost-efficient. For instance, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Moreover, it allows for hyper-focussed targeting based on demographics, geographical areas and even behaviours, giving you ample control and better quality results, whether it’s more leads or quicker conversions. Also, when compared to organic marketing, you can see results almost instantly, and even alter your approach speedily, in real-time.
What are the drawbacks of organic and paid digital marketing?
The primary disadvantage of organic digital marketing is the amount of time it takes to show the desired results. It can take years before you see a significant shift. However, once you get it right, the benefits will also continue for a long time to come. That said, you must keep tabs on changing SEO trends and the user needs to constantly optimize your approach. This makes it a high-involvement exercise.
As the name suggests, paid marketing channels require you to provide funds up-front. Also, this approach requires experts to be on board, to ensure that your budget allocation is ideal, and yields the best possible results. Similar to organic marketing, here also you have to keep a tab on several metrics such as impressions, clicks, and CTR. You must use this data to refine your strategy and boost performance in return.
When it comes to this form of marketing, another thing to keep in mind is that the benefits last only as long as you’re paying. There’s no residual or lasting effect. Once you stop paying or take your ads offline, the benefits end immediately.
Can you integrate an organic marketing strategy with paid digital marketing strategies?
If you intend to have healthy interactions with your target audience and build a long-lasting rapport, then organic digital marketing is your answer. On the other hand, if you wish to intimate your audience about your offerings instantaneously and give your sales revenue a boost, there’s merit in looking into paid digital marketing tools.
However, the best way forward is to pick a mix of both, an organic marketing strategy and a paid marketing strategy. are effective. While the former builds awareness and establishes you as a credible, paid digital marketing tool to attract, engage and convert, specifically for a defined period/campaign. You can address long-term and short-term goals effectively when you adopt this approach.
In fact, several independent studies have found that when these two strategies work in tandem and feed off of each other, they perform better in comparison to when they are used independently. In a 2019 survey by BrightEdge, businesses using SEO (organic marketing tool) and pay-per-click campaigns (paid digital marketing tool), saw an increase of 25% more clicks (on average) and 27% in profits.
Since both have advantages unique to them, they can help you achieve different goals. And if you need an unbiased opinion on how to make the best use of both, Resolute B2B is here for you. We offer organic and paid digital marketing services to help you succeed. Leave your details here or give us a call at (+91) 8121631602 or +1 (302-664-8181) to know more.
