Organic vs. Paid Marketing: Why Use Both In Your 2022 Marketing Plan

Employing the right methods to target, reach, engage, and convert audiences is paramount to your business growth. With the myriad of online platforms consumers use nowadays, it can be challenging to determine where, when, and how to use the many digital marketing tools available at your fingertips. And with all digital marketing strategies ultimately falling into two categories – organic or paid – it’s particularly beneficial to know how to harness both to achieve your business goals.

While organic marketing encompasses a more holistic, word-of-mouth style of messaging, paid marketing is more sales-focused. Organic marketing is all about content and focuses on education, entertainment, better search results, and building customer loyalty. Paid marketing distributes micro-targeted ads and sponsored posts to users on social media and search engines.

Let’s take a dive into both so you can understand the value each brings, and how you can employ a solid mix of both as you begin prepping your 2022 marketing calendar.

Organic Marketing

Organic marketing – or inbound marketing – is a content-based strategy that primarily focuses on education and entertainment to build brand awareness and enrich the connection with your audience. Brands often use organic marketing to establish brand personality and tone, build relationships, provide solutions to problems, and provide customer service.

3 Benefits of Organic Marketing

1. Grow brand awareness and visibility where people are already spending their time, such as social media and search engines.
2. Boost your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is an organic marketing tool that targets consumers using search engines to solve a problem — and it packs quite a punch; so much so that it drives 1,000% more traffic to your site than organic social media campaigns.
3. Build customer loyalty with your existing audience. You have a following because people are already sold on (and love) your brand. Organic marketing enables you to continue providing value and reminding your customer base that you reign supreme over your competitors.

Organic Marketing Examples

• Search Engines (SEO)
• Unpaid Social Media Posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, etc.
• Blog Posts (This very post you’re reading is an organic marketing effort)
• Email Newsletters
• Online Public Relations
• Link Generation
• Guest Posts
• User-Generated Content

Paid Marketing

We have all seen sponsored posts or ads when scrolling social media or the first page of Google-search results. You might find yourself thinking, “Wow – I have been meaning to buy that,” or “How do they know me so well?” This is paid marketing — also called inorganic marketing. Paid marketing allows you to dial into a specific audience you haven’t yet reached and convert their clicks into sales. In other words, you’re paying for results.

With paid advertising, you can quantify a campaign’s success by using ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). This is a revenue-measuring metric that compares every dollar of sales from the ad to the money spent on the ad campaign. If you made $5 for every $1 spent on an ad campaign, your ROAS would be 5:1.

3 Benefits of Paid Marketing

1. Placing ads right where your audience is already looking means reaching your audience quickly and more directly. As more users have grown accustomed to buying products and services directly from their social platforms or search-engine results, paid marketing is being proven highly effective.
2. Paid marketing attracts NEW followers and customers.
3. Generates leads and drives conversions.

Paid Marketing Examples

• Pay-Per-Click
• Social Media Ads
• Influencer Marketing
• Banner Ads
• Ad Retargeting
• Billboards, Posters, or Printed Materials

Integrating Paid And Organic Strategies Into Your 2022 Marketing Plan

Organic and paid marketing, like peanut butter and jelly, complement each other and often perform best when you use a smart mix of the two. But you need to have a plan for balancing the two strategies that will give you the best ROI.

The new year is a great time to create a well-defined marketing strategy and an actionable plan for getting the most out of your paid and organic marketing. PixelPeople’s digital marketing services help you understand the audience you’re targeting and how best to reach them. It includes a strategy that works for you over time, while maximizing your use of the content that is created. Contact us today to talk about your 2022 strategy!

Tags: search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, seo