Are you promoting your business with organic or paid content? Or perhaps, is the right approach a strategic blend of both? We have prepared this article to guide you in choosing the optimal digital advertising and positioning strategy according to your unique business goals.
What is Organic Content?
Organic content refers to a material that is generated and reaches your audience without paid advertising efforts. Through organic content, you can gradually increase website traffic and strengthen your brand's presence online. The goal of organic content formats is to help you build lasting relationships with your audience, engaging, educating, or entertaining them until they transition into customers, and beyond.
Examples of Organic Content:
You're probably realizing that this type of content likely dominates your content strategy. Examples of organic marketing include:
- Social media profile posts that aren't sponsored content
- Newsletters (email bulletins) to your clients
- Blog posts – both your own and those from external experts and other brands
- User-generated content for your brand – comments, reviews, and ratings of your products
- Articles and features about your brand on external channels that link back to your website
Key to Organic Marketing: An effective SEO strategy is crucial when relying on organic content. According to HubSpot, search engine optimization (SEO) has the potential to drive over 1000% more traffic to your site compared to regular organic social media posts.
When to Use Organic Content?
"Whenever possible!" is the short answer. Regardless of whether it is fully or partially integrated, organic content should play a role in your digital channel marketing strategy. Remember, the primary goal of organic marketing is about building brand recognition over time, so visible results require patience. Of course, blind organic content won't be effective, either. Here are some valuable tips on how to approach its planning:
1. Study your audience behavior.
Which channels bring you the most organic traffic? Are these articles on your blog or videos on your YouTube channel? Professional tools like Google Analytics, Semrush, and others can help you identify the most popular sources of organic traffic to your site.
2. Create relevant content.
Insights from step 1 will guide you on what content resonates and engages your audience. Plan more of it in similar formats and on related topics.
3. Optimize your content.
SEO is involved again, as it's what makes organic content effective for your business. Essential SEO tactics include incorporating keywords into your texts and messages, creating meta data to help search engines index your site, and ensuring a good user experience through design, functionality, and site speed.
4. Monitor and improve continuously.
Which part of your content is yielding results, and what is underperforming? Remember, optimization is an ongoing process that doesn't stop the moment you publish new articles, videos, or social media posts.
Aside from capturing your audience's attention, organic content serves as a strong foundation for your paid content strategy.
Paid Content
As expected, paid content involves allocating a budget to specifically target a certain group of online users. It offers precise audience targeting, engagement with suitable content formats, and propelling them towards making a purchase or conversion in a short timeframe. Moreover, you're reaching users who might have never heard of your business before.
Popular Formats of Paid Content include sponsored social media posts, banners on most websites, Google search ads, YouTube video ads, and more.
When to Use Paid Content?
As you have assumed, paid content is typically aimed at selling a product or service, getting subscriptions or sign-ups, or other actions valuable to your business. To assess the effectiveness of your paid content strategy, you can gauge results like the number of reached users, ad impressions, sales against your budget spend, cost per acquisition, and numerous other metrics tracked by standard advertising platforms. We are diving into suitable advertising strategies for various online platforms in separate articles.
In Conclusion
Leverage organic content to establish your business's recognition and engage your audience. Yes, it requires the right strategy, perseverance, and patience, but the results are sustainable. Plus, you don't need an advertising budget! On the other hand, paid content yields quick outcomes, more sales, website visits, or other conversions. It is suitable for direct positioning of specific products and services to a targeted audience.
What's your online content strategy? Let's discuss it and collaboratively choose the right content for your business and audience. Reach out to us for a free consultation today!
