Paid marketing vs organic marketing. What’s best for you?

If you don’t understand this one simple thing about advertising your business, you’re going to lose a huge sum of money very quickly. That is that advertising is an accelerator, not an initiator. Meaning that advertising can take something that you already have, a good offer, an excellent product, a good service that’s already selling well and can help you get it in front of even more people just like your best customers. But what advertising can’t do is take a new offer, a new idea, or a new product or service, something that hasn’t been proven yet, and just magically make it sell. Sure, anytime you launch something in the market it might sell right away but these are the exception, not the rule.

The reality is that advertising is like any other kind of marketing and your ability to succeed with ads and make serious bank comes down to just a few simple factors. Unfortunately, most people don’t know about these things, or they ignore them completely and then just start pumping money into the ad platform, hoping that they’ll get lucky, and something will just mysteriously click. But that’s not marketing, that’s gambling, and the odds are not in your favor, especially if you’re new to the online advertising world.

A lot of people have this question in their minds, whether I should for paid marketing or organic marketing or maybe even both? Let’s investigate some points on paid marketing vs organic marketing to help you decide what’s best for you.

There’s a common misconception about this. A lot of people think that paid marketing costs money (which it does) and organic marketing is free. Paid marketing does cost money but organic marketing is in no way free. Why? Because it takes your time. Whereas paid marketing takes little time. You can spend money on paid marketing at breakfast and make a profit by lunch. At the same time, organic marketing takes a substantially longer time to get going, and to scale organic marketing takes one’s time too. So, money can be a pro point for organic marketing, but time is a pro point for paid marketing. Keep in mind that organic marketing is not ‘free’, rather it requires no money. Because you will have to input a ton of time and your time is worth something.

Organic marketing is a slow and steady approach to marketing. It’s where your consistent content starts to come into play. This includes being active on social media, engaging with other people’s accounts, using hashtags, and jumping to trends such as reels. It also focuses on blogs, SEO, and content that essentially will live in the online world for as long as you can imagine. You will not see a drastic impact on your business right away but it’s an important piece to focus on.

All the posts you put out on social media are examples of organic marketing. It is as simple as that. Sometimes you may not even be advertising your business or product or service but as long as it’s on your business account it’s essentially an organic ad for something. Blog posts can be a little tricky and can only work well if you’re a great writer and understand the SEO best practices. These blog posts would be about your business and a topic that your target audience would like to know. In the blog, you could have hyperlinks to your websites. That’s where people can click to learn more about your business and be able to book meetings with you.

This kind of marketing works well if the people are searching for that problem that you can solve on Google specifically. As mentioned earlier, to make this work you must understand the basics of search engine optimization since your primary target is people who search on google.

Another thing you could do is have guest blog posts which are blogs written by knowledgeable people contributing to your blog. You can also use user-generated content which is an efficient aspect of content marketing. In this context means the content that your users made about your product. You could post about the testimonials that they have of you. These types of content make things stand out for you because it is coming directly from a different voice than yours.

Organic marketing is supposed to generate warm traffic to your website and your social media accounts. It’s a slow and steady approach. With paid you can go as fast as you want to based on your goals and your budget. As long as you have a budget behind you, you know the ins and outs of paid advertising, and you can essentially reach millions of people overnight. The biggest thing we would like to get across with paid marketing is that just because you place an ad one day does not mean you will get rich overnight. You need to be patient with paid advertising. The power behind paid marketing is that you can target exactly who you want to attract into your business and get them to take the specific action that you want them to take i.e., become a lead, purchase something, register for an event whatever the case may be for your business.

The main difference between organic marketing and paid marketing is that with organic marketing you are consistently coming up with new posts in the marketing materials. It’s an ongoing process. With paid you can use the same ad or posts for years if it’s converting the way you want it to.

Another terrific way to look at the differences, if you’re debating where to start, is by looking back to your current goals for your business. If you want to grow a solid foundation if you want to attract a warm audience and increase your brand awareness, organic marketing is the place to start for you. But if you want to convert your audience to take action with your business outside of just consuming your free content, paid is the way to go.

If you’re at a point where you can combine both, that is when things rocket for you. Organic content is going to help you to continually be in the eyes of your audience and start to build that trust even deeper. Your paid marketing is going to help you to boost the back ends in terms of your internal investment, get your revenue moving or get your email list and reach an even bigger audience.