Digital Marketing: Organic vs Paid

Digital marketing is an essential element in the marketing mix. Target audiences that are spending an increasing amount of time online. On average people are online for 24 hours a week. That’s twice as long as 10 years ago with 1 in 5 adults spending as much as 40 hours a week online.*

Digital marketing falls into 2 categories organic and paid. These use push and pull marketing strategies to influence your target audience. To get the right balance you must understand what each one does for you. Whether you’re B2B or B2C, and how it will help you reach your target audience.

What Is Organic Digital Marketing?

Organic marketing is naturally attracting customers over time through search engines like Google or social media like Facebook. SEO (search engine optimisation) and social media are tools to boost organic growth.

Pull marketing is designed to attract customers towards a product and is a marketing strategy that organic campaigns do very well.

What are the advantages of organic marketing?

  • Customers have a more authentic experience and develop a stronger connection to your brand
  • Unlimited potential to generate new leads
  • Low cost to set up and maintain (compared to paid channels)

What are the disadvantages of organic marketing?

  • Competition for organic sources is high, making it difficult to stand out from your competition
  • Catch 22: you need a higher page position for more clicks, but you need more clicks for a higher rank
  • Unreliable targeting – even with targeted keywords you have no real control over who sees your content

What Is Paid Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing: Organic vs PaidPaid marketing is exactly what it sounds like. Paid adverts/promotions to appear in front of an audience. There are many different choices online, but the most effective platforms are Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc.

Push marketing is where products are promoted by “pushing” them out to customers and is a marketing strategy that paid campaigns do very well.

What are the advantages of paid marketing?

  • Accurate targeting enables you to tailor your audience for your product and your ad for your audience
  • Recordable and actionable data, you can optimise and improve every element based on its performance
  • Reliable ROI (return on investment) thanks to payment models like PPC (pay per click)

What are the disadvantages of paid marketing?

  • Unlike organic marketing, paid ads are often seen as less credible making you work harder to convince prospects you’re right for them
  • The potential ROI is limited by your budget because paid ads require a constant flow of money to produce new leads

What’s right for my digital marketing mix?

Before you commit to a digital marketing strategy you must assess your market, competition, and goals. This will give you the information you need to decide what’s best for your business, based on your unique situation.

Organic and paid marketing is often used in tandem with one another. Using organic marketing to pull in customers and create the initial interest. Then following up with paid marketing to push your product in front of prospects when they’re ready to buy.

Breathe can advise on the best mix of organic and paid marketing for your business. Call us on 01491 575057 or email us at info@breathe4u.com to find out more.

*Source: Telegraph 2/8/18