As a digital marketing agency, we get asked this question a lot by our clients. How are the two different from each other and which one would we recommend? This question can’t be answered with a simple yes or no. Rather, we need to
understand the two to understand what sets them apart from each other and how they can benefit the business of our clients.
They are both marketing strategies that help a business grow and each has its own benefits. Let’s take a look at them.
A marketing strategy that helps generate traffic over a period of time rather than paid methods, organic marketing attracts customers to the brand through SEO, blog posts, case studies, and other channels such as social media.
The goal of organic marketing is to create that is engaging and/or informative. Such kind of content will attract prospective customers towards the brand and thus later turn into paid customers. If your content attracts customers and is
able to retain them through just content without any financial assistance you can consider that a big win. While social media is a major contributor to the traffic garnered through organic marketing we all would agree that SEO is what
really is responsible for ultimate success when it comes to conversion.
A couple of ways to measure organic marketing metrics are listed below
- Create interest amongst your customers as to why your product could be valuable to them
- Pull in your prospective customers by further educating them about your product or service and why it’s the best purchase they could make in their entire lifetime.
- Social Media – Engagement on social media with respect to likes, comments, shares, reposts, and tags, goes on to show how well the brand is doing.
Paid Marketing, on the other hand, would require financial investment in ads that would target a specific audience to your brand.
When a client gravitates toward paid advertising, they are looking to increase and retain traffic at a faster rate than organic marketing. This includes converting viewers into customers to meet a specific goal within a time period.
Marketers can then track the traffic and keep a check on whether engagement is up to desired requirements.
Each time an advertisement is clicked on, the publisher gets paid. This is known as Pay per click advertising. Via an advertisement, when a website attracts customers, it is known as paid traffic.
A couple of ways to measure paid marketing metrics are listed below
- Impressions are the number of people who have seen your advertisements.
- Clicks: The number of people who clicked on your advertisement after seeing it.
- CTR: The percentage of impressions that lead to clicks.
- Relevancy Score (Facebook Ads): To indicate how relevant an ad is to its intended audience.
As compared to organic marketing, paid marketing works better in terms of reaching an audience directly rather than waiting for customers to visit a website organically.
Paid marketing and organic marketing both have their strengths and drawbacks. So you can’t really tell which is better than the other. However, to achieve optimum results the best thing to do would be to use the two as a combination.
The strengths would work to cancel out the weaknesses of the other and it would ultimately work to your client’s benefit!