Factors to Consider When Deciding Between Organic and Paid Marketing

Regardless of whether you are in the early stages of setting up your small business or if you are in need of a fresh perspective, concocting the right marketing strategy for your business is a crucial element to stand out in the digital business world. A solid strategy tailored to your needs can be something which could kick-start your business in the desired direction.

Naturally, when you start thinking about the best marketing strategy option for your products or services, you inevitably touch the subject of paid and organic marketing and which could prove itself to be the optimal solution to your needs. To help you make that decision, here are the three vital factors you should consider: time, longevity and the cost.

The time it takes to see the results

To understand the benefits of each of these two strategies here is first a simplified overview: the organic marketing relies on studying the search engine algorithms and ’earning’ the top position among the search results; the paid marketing advertisements will climb the search results ladder by paying for them to pop up first.

If you own a startup business which is struggling to promote itself as quickly as possible, then paid marketing can be the perfect solution for you. It can help you reach your target audience fast and to spread the word about your brand efficiently since it is quite a challenge for a new brand to get noticed in the sea of other trusted and well-known brands. The results that you get will be quantifiable so you will have no problem tracking conversion rates or establishing the efficiency of any platform, type of ads and their components.

On the other hand, if the time is not of importance, then you could opt for organic marketing as the main strategy. The tactics behind it consist of acquiring all the ranking factors and this is a learning curve which takes time to build and sustain. In order to know how efficient your approach is, you will need to monitor the traffic to your blog and other website sections, the number of leads that turned to sales as well as whether blogs, social media or email are the most thriving formats from driving traffic. 

The longevity of the impact

Venturing into any of these two game plans means that you need to take into consideration not only how fast you will reach your audience but how long the effect will last. Something which could help you decide on one of the two are your business goals. Some goals might require instant results, while others might need a more permanent effect.

Since organic marketing is based on tailoring your strategy so it can be implemented in the most natural manner, the process might be longer but the fruits of that labor also last longer. For instance, you can build strong connections with an efficient social mention monitoring strategy, which can help you learn about your audience’s genuine tastes and interests. This will enable you to give them exactly the content they want and also to react quickly should some problems arise and your brand is mentioned in a negative connotation. Building an influential brand is not something done overnight and it requires embedding deep in the digital business world.

For those who wish to reach their target audience here and now, without the need for that effect to be rooted, paid marketing is the answer. This doesn’t mean that the life of a marketing method implemented in this manner has to be short. However, it usually is and it could be compared to different internet fads which are enormously popular at one point because they hit the consumers in the right manner at precisely the right time. They are more than efficient but they are mostly forgotten as soon as a new trend appears.

The costs behind the strategy

One of the essential factors for measuring the efficiency of solutions you implement is their cost. Not a lot of small businesses can afford costly action plans and most times they don’t even need complex methods – they just think in terms that the more money they pay, the better service they will get. Also, the results that the strategy yielded might just not fit the cost.

As the name suggests, paid marketing puts more stress on your budget and it is suited for those businesses who want to express solutions and which can afford it. The costs can vary depending on many factors, such as the popularity of the keyword, its type and even the relevance of your landing page. However, businesses are no stranger to errors even in this department, so for example, if the user is looking for a product, you need to make sure the link leads to that product and not your home page, as well as for your keyword to be narrow enough to include only what you intend to.

Organic marketing costs more in terms of time than money since it takes a while for your research and analysis to take roots among your audience. The money you invest at the beginning is the basis upon which you expand your customer base which means you are not starting from scratch and investing each month. Instead, you are relying on the foundations that you constructed and expanding them in all directions by applying the strategies devised from the research and knowledge which was steadily acquired.

In conclusion

If the information on the factors left you feeling you just cannot opt for one, chances are you are in need of a combination of these two strategies, as most successful marketing campaigns do. This blend could work very successfully in different situations so you could use paid marketing to achieve customized instant results when you need them. Parallel to this, you can run a steady organic marketing strategy in the background to improve your presence in the search results.

The wisest approach is to be in tune with the market changes and cater to your audience’s needs with all the tools which are at your disposal. In this manner, you will provide enough boost and flexibility so your business can thrive.

By Victor T. Miller – Contributor | 12/09/2019