In today’s world, we can benefit from so many marketing tools and techniques that it makes it difficult to choose! With various marketing strategies at your disposal, it is important to determine which ones will work best for you. The following will help you understand what these are and what they are used for. Both paid and organic are tremendously important and most businesses use a healthy mix of both to optimise their marketing efforts. I like to think of the campaign-types as superheroes. Each one has different strengths so using a combination is generally the best way to fight the battle. Paid marketing is faster, often at a higher price, and is more measurable. Organic marketing is more steady, provides longer-term effectiveness, and can be used to establish yourself as a thought leader within your industry, as well as to boost brand credibility. 

Since search engines have existed, there have been digital marketing activities in some form or another. For businesses today, there are various channels you can explore to achieve your business goals digitally. Note that I said business goals digitally, not your digital goals. It is important to work backwards from your business goals in order to determine the best strategy for achieving them. 

Here is a list of organic marketing activities:

• SEO link building
• Podcasts 
• Social Media Marketing 
• Email Marketing 
• Content Marketing
• Guest blogs

Here is a list of paid marketing activities:

• LinkedIn Sponsored inMail, Sponsored Content, Text Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Instagram Ads
• Twitter Ads
• Google AdWords
• Bing and Yahoo Ads
• Amazon PPC

I’m sure I haven’t even exhausted this list as there are new marketing tools available to us regularly. As a non-marketer, there are actions you can take to fulfil your goals online and with a little bit of guidance, you can easily get started. However, as digital marketing becomes more competitive, there is a wealth of knowledge required to manage these activities. Thus, it is important to pick a few channels and focus specifically on those rather than spreading yourself too thin. 

Organic Marketing

1. Organic marketing is intention-driven and is labour intensive. You manually promote creative content, whether this is visuals or copy.
2. Organic marketing spans all social media platforms, search engines, and websites.
3. Organic techniques are mainly used for “top of the funnel” brand awareness activities to familiarise your target audience with your brand, tone of voice and product/service.
4. These activities are used to establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche or industry. It is a great way to educate your audience on the problem-solution fit and product-market fits that your brand looks to achieve.
5. Bottom line is that the more relevant and original content you create, the greater your chances are to attract an engaged audience. The effects of the content generated digitally last for a long period of time making this a long-term investment.

Paid Marketing

1. It is possible to run paid campaigns across various digital channels but the objective must be clear. It is specifically to drive certain actions from your audience.
2. Paid marketing is often more expensive than organic since it involves Cost-Per-Click or CPM (Cost-Per-1000 Impressions) campaigns. However, organic can become expensive too if you are producing regular content for your digital channels as it involves a tremendous amount of talent and labour. 
3. Paid marketing achieves short-term results that can be advantageous to your business when you rapidly need to grow. Alternatively, it can also help with ‘failing fast’ when you want to receive feedback on an assumption and quickly validate it. 
4. Paid marketing helps with conversions, traffic campaigns, brand awareness, lead generation, driving impressions, and acquiring larger audiences quickly.
5. These campaigns help with achieving a promising ROI or ROAS on direct and measurable investments made.

Both paid and organic have their advantages. It can be easy to be mesmerized by the effects of any superhero. However, which one will save your day? If you would like to learn more about what your strategy should be, which channels you should use, and further insights on your potential to grow within your industry, contact us at hello@socialgamma.com