Organic Vs Paid Marketing? Where to Invest in 2020?

The market has totally evolved over these years. Gone are the days of traditional marketing, where we used to market our products on radios, newspapers, print advertisements, billboards, etc. Today, the market has adopted newer forms of marketing, making us digitally enhanced. As per the latest report from Drum, Global ad spends will reach $605 billion in 2020. In fact, by 2020, businesses will spend $110 billion on digital advertising in the US.

The market has totally adopted newer finer modes of advertising. Today, businesses, in order to effectively boost their sales and marketing process, prefer the use of electronic devices including desktops, mobile phones, digital media, and other platforms to promote their products & services. Digitalization has given customers search engines as a very effective tool to browse solutions for any of their queries.

As per the latest SEO Statistics for 2020. In 2019 (to date), Google accounted for just over 75% of all global desktop search traffic, followed by Bing at 9.97%, Baidu at 9.34%, and Yahoo at 2.77%. Google has received nearly 2.3 trillion searches this year.

All search engines, in their tech glory, represent two completely different yet equally valuable traffic sources to customers and marketers around the world: Organic Marketing & Paid Marketing. Let us have a glance over these two modes of marketing in a brief manner.

Paid Marketing (Pay per Click)

Paid marketing involves ads shown on the search engines, ads within context, social media ads, etc. This form of advertising is very popular in today's scenario because of its potential to build brand recognition in a very short interval of time. This kind of business the module has high upfront costs but offers high scalability at the same time. If you are looking for instant results and have sufficient funds in your pocket, you are good to go with paid marketing. The method to drive traffic through this source is called Search Engine Marketing.

Organic Marketing

Also called Inbound Marketing are the search results below paid Ads, Google, or any other social engine that shows when a customer makes any search. Organic marketing simply meant for the ones looking to carve long term benefits. Content Marketing, social media, word of mouth, blogs, website, etc forms the part of organic marketing and are of the very fine ways to reach potential customers around the world. The method to drive traffic through this source is called Search Engine Optimisation.

Let us quickly go through the pros and cons of organic and paid marketing in detail to help us understand it better.

PROS OF ORGANIC MARKETING

Choosing Organic Marketing as your efficient adverting tool can really carve you numerous benefits. It helps to effectively build online trust among your customers and help you scale throughout your life.

1. It’s Almost Free & Natural:

Yes, when we talk about marketing organically, it won’t dig a hole in your pocket. Because it is totally free and natural all you have to do is widespread beautiful and meaningful content across the globe.

2. Enhance Your Reach:

By making customers how your business is going to solve his or her problem through right meaningful content will not only help you get more customers for your business but even let you enhance your reach through quality referrals and sharing.

3. Long Term Benefits:

Organic marketing even lets you carve long term benefits for your business. When we talk about content marketing, getting your content spread across the internet web will land customers to your business. This one-time investment will surely bring efficient revenue for your business.

4. Build Trust Among Customers.

For those, who haven’t come across your business yet, organic marketing can increase your chances to target such customers. If a customer finds your content ranking in the top two pages of the website, this will reflect him your chances to be genuine and effective.

CONS OF ORGANIC MARKETING

Though Organic Marketing is effectively beneficial for your business, it brings come cons as well.

1.  It's Slow & Time Consuming:

Since organic marketing all depends upon the quality of content and efforts you are putting in your marketing strategy, it sufficiently takes a little more time in getting you some customers. Normal ideal time is around 3-6 months and that too depends on your regular efforts.

2. Difficult to Track:

Organic marketing doesn’t support any tools for keeping track of your customers. You can’t track traffic drawn to your site through any particular section. But with the Google Analytics code embedded to your side, you can easily track all your effective leads input.

PROS OF PAID MARKETING

For those who are born with a silver spoon and carving for short term- instant benefits, paid marketing will be good to go. It not only helps in bringing benefits very shortly but helps in greater organic visibility across the internet globe. This type of traffic involves the concept of Pay per click where you need to pay search engines and social media players for any customer that landed on your business via paid links.

1. Its Fast and Time efficient:

With paid marketing, you can enjoy instant traffic to your website through all sponsored ads and promotions setup for your business.

2. Easy to Track:

It offers you excellent tools to monitor crowdsource and incoming sales. This then can help you effectively build plan your paid marketing strategy for your business.

3. More Refine Targeting

Paid marketing even lets you target customers as per your business interest. This saves you a lot from unnecessary targeting and wastage of time, thereby letting you scale your business early and efficiently.

4. Cost Control:

This form of advertising even lets you control your cost allocation over your marketing funnel. Because of efficient monitoring tools, you can easily allocate your market budget over a large number of keywords, choosing the one that will return maximum returns.

5. Variety of Options:

Paid marketing offers a wide number of tools to effectively target customers for your business. Since they are available on multiple channels and platforms, when they are repeatedly shown your business ads, it generates more trust and that leads to effective sales for your business.

6. Drive Customers Directly:

With paid marketing tools you can effectively make your customers land to specific pages on your website, thereby allowing you to effectively target customers for your business.

CONS OF PAID MARKETING

1. Highly Cost Intensive:

Paid marketing is highly costly when it comes to planning marketing campaigns and cost allocation. With equivalent charges spent over setting campaigns and advertising them, it put a lot of pressure on businesses to manage cost allocation.

2. Inefficient Bidding Concept:

Another major problem when it comes about pay per click model of advertising is its bidding concepts. For so many businesses, especially eCommerce marketplaces bidding for major keywords all the time, it won’t carve your sufficient benefits anyhow.

3. Complex Tools

Though there are a number of paid marketing tools available to track your customers and sales. But these tools are not that easy to start with, despite the easy targeting methods, if applied wrongly over wrong keywords, didn’t omit negative keywords from your marketing funnel can sufficiently land you into major losses for your business.

4. Constant Monitoring Needed

In order to drive quick and efficient results, you need to monitor your paid marketing funnel all the time to understand your traffic source and behavior. It even demands to hire SEO professionals for your marketing needs.

5. Hiring staff for your marketing:

Managing your paid marketing funnel even demands the hiring quality staff members which will include, SEO professional, content writer, campaign marketer, customer sales representatives, etc.

DOES SPONSORED PROMOTIONS & ADVERTISING REALLY CARVE ANY PROFITS?

Though, how much you thrive in the world of paid marketing, it will be always the organic marketing that can help you reap the utmost benefits. Businesses and social media platforms sell their paid marketing strategies promising wider reach, increased engagements, higher conversion rates, etc. These businesses make ample money every second through their paid marketing tools, whether it’s about PPC, sponsored or featured ads, every single feature contributes a major portion to their revenues. In fact, according to Merkle’s Digital Marketing Report, advertising spending on these Social Media Platforms has grown by 400% last year. These companies make more than 90% of their revenues from paid advertising.

BUSINESS SEGMENT MAJORLY TARGETED BY THESE PLATFORMS?

From search engines to online marketplaces every small or big player has an integrated system of paid advertising into their business modules. Either through PPC, marketing campaigns, sponsored ads, paid promotions these businesses bamboozle sellers, service providers & business owners. We are majorly attracted to paid advertising modules as businesses often manipulate sellers in the name of wider reach and fast results. Whether we talk about the small or big businesses, individual sellers, service providers or professionals everyone finds these paid modules really attractive and are driven towards these modes of advertising. The soul idea to choose these kinds of advertising modes is to bring immediate results. However, paid marketing never entails long term benefits as consumers have started to catch on. Sadly, thanks to the influencer culture, we see businesses and individual creators give more value to paid promotions and sponsored posts, than to promoting their actual creations.

ORGANIC VS PAID MARKETING – WHICH ONE TO CHOOSE?

Ever since markets have turned immense competitive, businesses have incorporated new means of digital reservations in the name of paid promotions & sponsorships. Your visibility to the targeted audience accounts for majorly on how much cost you are ready to allocate to sponsored ads. Organic advertising which ensures long term success of a brand digital presence is finally losing its existence in chapters of online businesses.

Businesses & Service providers in order to reach potential customers find sponsored ads as one of the very attractive means. Sadly, thanks to the social media turn marketplaces that incorporated this paid culture into the system. But, at the end of the day what actually matters is the business earned over the day but what we majorly fail is to count the actual profit earned. On the other side, we have completely forgotten our long-term virtues. Though opting conventional strategies for your venture makes sense, considering the drawbacks sometimes are also fruitful.

Finally, which one to choose?

With almost 4.54 billion people active internet users as of January 2020, encompassing 59 percent of the global population, the customer today value businesses that exhibit a strong online presence. Gone are the times when the customer was unaware of the sponsored & paid ads running over social engines and marketplaces. Customers today before finalizing any deal at least look for 4-5 alternatives and don’t trust sponsored businesses anymore. As per a recent study of MarTech 70-80% of users are only focusing on the organic results.

Organic marketing is not only cost-savvy but carves long term benefits. Though it takes time, the benefit of organic marketing will show in the deep and lasting relationships you’ll build with clients. Also, with 90% of sellers participating in the paid promotions and advertising, these platforms are failing hefty in making sellers reach the right audience. We recommend sellers to opt both forms of marketing strategies into their funnel, thereby generating trust and sales at the same time. However, when it comes to operating their individual websites, we recommend sellers to join online marketplaces in comparison of selecting individual websites. For understanding everything in detail check out our article. E-Commerce Websites Vs Online Marketplaces? Which One to Choose?