It won’t be hard to guess that organic marketing is about driving free traffic. Paid marketing drives traffic to your website for money. Nevertheless, both types of marketing have their pros and cons.
Besides, nobody says that one type of marketing is better or worse than the other. However, both paid and organic marketing is widely used by marketers in their strategies.
In this guide, you will get an idea what type of marketing is better to use and at what stage of your marketing strategy.
Let’s start!
Paid and Organic Marketing Basics
To get an idea of what type of marketing to use at your current marketing stage, you need to know the fundamental principles of both types of marketing.
Paid marketing helps you drive traffic to your site by making an advertisement. This advertisement costs you money. It is not free of charge. When you create paid ads across the platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter, you pay for every ad click. And doesn’t guarantee that people will convert into your customer or sign up for your newsletter.
Organic marketing is the same process of driving traffic to the site but without using paid ads. It involves creating valuable content and distributing it on the web. The final goal is to interact with your target audience and attract new potential leads.
Paid vs. organic marketing – which one to choose?
Marketers can’t state that paid marketing is better than organic marketing and vice versa. Both these types of marketing bring results.
The thing is that paid and organic marketing strategies have different goals. But, if you use them together, you can bring the best results.
For example, Visme uses both organic and paid marketing to let more people know about the product. And the content marketing team creates optimized content to rank high on Google. What’s more important, this content is heavily promoted via such channels as email and social media.
Moreover, the Visme team doesn’t shy away from promoting the majority of content with paid ads. Visme mixes organic and paid marketing in its content promotion strategy.
How to Create an Organic Content Marketing Strategy
Since you are familiar with the difference between paid and organic marketing, it is time to see how to create an organic marketing strategy.
1. Identify you target audience
If you can’t figure out who your target audience is, you won’t be able to create content that would make sense for your business.
For example, you own a photography studio for pets. And you create content that covers the following topic:
“how to create comfortable conditions for the pets before the photo session”
This information would be interesting for pets photography studio owners mostly. However, it is not the right audience for your business.
Instead, you should work on covering topics similar to:
“how to find the best photographers for your pet”
Why is it important to identify your target audience right?
Because the wrong target audience will give zero results to your business.
Therefore, it is strictly important to identify your target audience correctly.
Start with market research. Then, work on creating a buyer persona. When you already have this information, you should move to the next step – choose your marketing goal.
2. Set your goal
Your primal goal is to create content that would attract potential leads. Despite the fact, you need to know “why” you are creating content in the first place.
There are four basic goals for content creation:
- Boost brand awareness (content must help introduce your brand to more wider audience)
- Interact with your audience (content should reveal the problems your audience has and show the ways how to solve them with the help of your product)
- Raise interest to your product (content should educate your audience and convince them why your product is the best option for them)
- Create loyalty and retain your customers (show how your customers can get the most of your product)
As you already guessed, your content will vary according to the chosen goals.
For example, if you want to create content for people who are at the “consideration” stage of the marketing funnel, then you can create a comparison post.
This post clearly shows why your product would be the best choice compared to the market competitors.
On the other hand, if you want to create content for a loyal customer base, then you should focus on building educational courses.
The aim of the course is to teach your customers how to get the most of your product or service.
Keep in mind that there is no point in choosing only one goal and follow it along the way. Nope. Each of the goals meets the needs of the entire sales funnel circle. Thus, you will have to create content for each goal moving down the funnel.
3. Choose a platform to use
Content creation doesn’t limit you in terms of platforms where your content can be published. In other words, you aren’t limited to using AI software to quickly churn out blog posts, post them on your blog and hope for the best. Instead, there are tons of platforms where you can place your content:
- Podcasts
- YouTube
- Social channels
- Forums
- Communities
- Third-party sites
- etc.
There are also other more experimental and new digital channels you can try, that can considerably increase your organic reach. However, No need to embrace all the channels – it won’t bring positive results. Instead, focus on those channels where your target audience hangs out.
How to figure out these channels?
Think about where your potential customers could search the information related to your business?
If it is something you can’t figure out, then reach out to your existing customers and ask them. You can run a quiz or walk in your customers’ shoes.
Practice shows that there are two places where people try to find answers to their questions – Google and YouTube.
Finally, now you have a clue what type of content to create. Video marketing and blogging are your first content priority.
Nevertheless, if you want to know the exact topics people search on Google and YouTube, you should run a keyword research analysis. Use one of the SEO tools that can offer this option. For example, Ahrefs gives an opportunity to play with the tool Keywords Explorer.
Everything you need to do is to type your target search requests and click the “Questions” tab that you can find by reviewing the “Matching terms” report.
Skim through the report and explore those topics that have the most search volume and less keyword difficulty to rank for.
4. Decide which format to choose
Each channel has its specifications when it comes to content format. For instance, if you create content for YouTube, then it will be video format only.
Likely, the other platforms can offer a few options for your content. Let’s say, you decided to focus your content marketing efforts on Instagram. And IG is the channel you chose. This channel allows you to publish the following content formats:
- Memes
- Photos
- Short videos
- Stories
- etc.
It all depends on what your target audience wants to see. Fortunately, if you have already done research and figured out your target audience, then you should ask people what they want from your content. You can get topic ideas and identify what content formats they prefer.
Plus, don’t be afraid of running experiments. For example, your target audience is fond of your comprehensive “how-to” guides, try to repurpose them into videos. Eventually, you will find out if this content format works for your audience and if you should continue experimenting.
To Sum Up
This guide has proven one thought – you can’t claim that paid marketing is better than organic and backward. Each type of marketing fits better to certain goals. In a nutshell, you shouldn’t choose one of them but combine it in your entire marketing strategy.
Don’t bother yourself with the decision from where to start. Use both marketing types following your business goals.
If you have anything else to add, feel free to share your ideas in the comments.
