Marketing activities are channeled to reach the target audience and to communicate your products and services to successfully convert, maintain and grow customers.
Modern customers are dependent on social media and search engines to influence their purchasing decisions. Hence, marketers need to know where, how, and when to effectively reach a customer.
Digital marketing is a vast concept but its core elements fall under two categories- Organic Marketing and Paid Marketing.
It is also important for marketers to understand and know when and how to use one over the other, and also, know how to utilize both to create a successful management strategy.
Organic marketing
Organic marketing is a strategy that can help generate traffic to your business over time. This includes blogs, unpaid tweets, case studies, Facebook updates, etc.
In other words, this is inbound marketing as they utilize SEO, social media, and other search engines to share suitable content to the target audience. Organic marketing can also be called Content Marketing as it involves creating and distributing content to attract customers.
Examples: blog posts, E-mail newsletters, link generation, user-generated content, etc.
Paid marketing
Paid marketing is a method of marketing to attract traffic through paid advertising. It is when brands pay Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. to have their content advertised to target customers.
Since 2020, people have spent more time on social media, and this has boosted online purchasing, thus, creating ample need for paid marketing that can create immediate conversion.
Examples: pay-per-click, social media advertising, banner ads, influencer marketing, etc.
Difference between Organic and Paid marketing
Even though both organic and paid marketing is characteristically different, they aim to create attention and promote sales.
Let us look into how they differ.
#1- Awareness
Through organic marketing, businesses intend to educate the audience about their product and services. This is done in a detailed manner, through optimized content. This content is shared via links on social media and through newsletters.
Paid marketing is more result-oriented, providing to-the-point phrases. It is more about instant attraction through catchy ads like Google ads, Facebook ads, etc.
#2- Investment
Using organic marketing brands can share information almost free of cost. Whereas paid promotion needs a larger budget to create ads, pay social media platforms, and it also needs proper advertising expertise.
#3- Placement
In organic marketing blogs, newsletters are created and rotated through various channels, expecting them to reach the target audience and influence them.
Paid marketing places ads right where the target audience is looking, creating instant sales.
#4- Life span
Organic marketing is a relationship-building tool, through detailed content it creates a brand presence in the minds of the audience.
The paid promotions have a short memory life span unless they resurface, and also these paid promotions are generally ignored.
#5- Customer creation
Organic marketing aims to influence, support, and retain customers for the long run. There is a slow rate or seldom chance of creating instant conversions.
Whereas, paid promotions can attract target customers instantly, creating an instant conversion.
#6- Target
Organic marketing is sharing information with the general audience and waiting for them to log on to the website, whereas, paid marketing precisely targets ideal customers, reaching the desired goals faster.
Conclusion
Paid and organic marketing are unique in their own ways, but they also complement each other when balanced and implemented strategically.
Paid promotions can attract new customers with fancy and colorful ads while you can retain and update customers with organic marketing.
Applying both the marketing strategies hand in hand can boost traffic. For instance, frequent brand posts on various platforms along with a paid social media ad campaign is sure to attract more traffic.
Brands should build marketing strategies that best their organizational goals.