A Digital Marketing dilemma : Paid vs Organic Marketing

Intro

Here’s one of those dilemmas that a digital marketing team goes through from time to time. When to pay for it? Of course we are talking about whether to prioritise the low and slow Organic efforts or solicit the hard and fast Paid route.

Firstly let’s break down the difference between the two.

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Organic Marketing vs Paid Marketing

Organic marketing focuses on generating traffic for free. Paid marketing focuses on generating marketing through paid efforts. That’s the key difference between the two.

Organic marketing will focus on things like blog posts, case studies, testimonials, web content, social media, video etc. It’s all user or self generated content that is technically free to create and distribute.

Paid marketing focuses on paid efforts like Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Google Ads, Programmatic Advertising, Social Media Ads, and Remarketing to name a few. WIth Paid marketing you pay for access to advertise or gain functions to target specific audiences, rather than play the waiting game and wait till audiences find you organically. It more or less guarantees impressions to your marketing message.

If this was a sales pitch, the allure to Paid efforts would be strong right now.

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Why shouldn’t I just pay for it?

See the graph below that best illustrates the effectiveness between paid vs organic marketing over time.

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The graph shows that typically when going with Paid efforts high levels of traffic can be experienced earlier on but is expected to drop as time goes on. The drop of traffic is experienced due to difficulty of maintaining costs and the dwindling of keeping content novel to targeted audiences over time. Over time it becomes difficult to maintain the freshness of a piece of Paid marketing content that it doesn’t actually convert impressions to traffic. With Paid, given enough time and with enough brand awareness already accrued it becomes more expensive to create and distribute content that’s suitable. Content has to become more and more novel for targeted audiences to convert and engage with.

Organic is more or less the opposite. It’s low and slow to start with low levels of traffic to be expected early on in its inception. Over time though and if implemented correctly, traffic can reach high volumes for cheap and or free. Because it’s cheap you don’t necessarily have to target specifically with it, so the funnel and variety to capture audiences is much wider.

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What’s the best way to approach Paid vs Organic Marketing?

Like all good things it requires balance. Paid blended with Organic is your best bet for long-term and continued success. Sprinkle in the most overlooked factor of digital marketing of course, which is time.

The best indicator of when to go for Paid or Organic is the timeframe you expect results to come in. If you need it quickly and in the short-run then Paid efforts will be incredibly useful to put your marketing message in front of targeted eyeballs quickly. It’s an overall great little effort to almost guarantee cut through to your target audience but over time it loses its effectiveness.

If you don’t necessarily expect results in the short-run then Organic pieces of content is the way to go. Over a longer time period the cost of acquisition of customers via Organic is almost always significantly cheaper than that of Paid. Organic pieces of marketing is far more scalable than its counterpart so usually a compounding effect is seen when given the right amount of time.

Another factor to take into account is how Paid and Organic content is being viewed or served to audiences. How the user arrives at that piece of content can be indicative of if that session will convert to actual sales dollars.

Advertising can be deemed intrusive and ‘in your face’, and take away from the user experience with the host site. If not done correctly it’s unwanted. Organic content though has to be reached through the intent of the user itself. The user is seeking the content and chooses to view it. If not done correctly it is also unwanted.

With the time frame and how the content is being viewed taken into consideration, the best use of Paid and Organic content is a blended approach for long-term digital strategy.

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Conclusion

Consider the graph above next time when not knowing when to prioritise Paid or Organic pieces of marketing. A blended approach is best with Knightlab typically recommending a stable foundation of brand awareness through Organic marketing, coupled with Paid efforts for cut through or specific campaigns with short time frames.

As a rule of thumb perpetually creating and paying attention to Organic marketing over a long period of time is advantageous for those compounding effects later down the line. However Paid will be required to leverage functions such as specific targeting to gain cut through and get your marketing message across once some brand awareness is required.

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