Ways to Combine Organic and Paid Advertising to Succeed Online

Many businesses face the promotional challenge of balancing organic reach and paid advertising to achieve their marketing goals. It’s impossible for a business to sustain long-term success by focusing on either extreme alone, but combining the two can propel your business’ reach and engagement. Here’s how you can combine your organic and paid advertising in order to succeed online.

Growing Your Organic Reach

You need to take advantage of the audience you already have and continue to expand it in order to achieve healthy, organic reach. The best way to do this is to focus on original and high-quality content creation through multiple avenues.

Invest Time in Your Blog

A blog is the best way to achieve organic results that will boost your business. A blog contains the type of relevant content that, if published frequently and consistently, will optimize your SEO and increase your ranking in search engine results. 55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority.

Your blog is your tool to answer your customers’ biggest questions about your business or industry in a different, more conversational manner than website copy. Blogs can also develop or strengthen relationships with new or existing customers, build trust with your audience, and establish you as a thought-leader in the industry.

Take some time to learn about blogging best practices and don’t forget to engage with your customers and influencers in the comments section of your blog! This will also give you great content to share on your social media pages, rounding out your content marketing strategy. Because others are able to share your blogs, your content will create an exponential opportunity for market growth.

Find Influencers

Influencers are customers who represent your business as a brand ambassador to share content such as their experience with your products or services, helpful advice, or other information that they find useful and that relates to your business or industry. Since 72% of consumers rely on influencers and social media to inform their purchase decisions, these brand ambassadors are a great way to extend your brand’s reach.

If your company has been around for a while, chances are you already have an established customer base. Now all you need to do is determine who would best represent your business as a customer.

There are digital tools that can help you identify potential influencers in your industry, but you can also use insights from your sales team or customer profiles to do so. Marketing research indicates that for every dollar a business spends on influencer marketing, they’ll get $6.50 back.

Get on the Right Social Platforms

Marketers must determine which social media platforms are right for their business. Spraying out content through every single platform risks losing sight of your overall goals and can frustrate your audience.

Find out where the majority of your customers are and stick to those platforms when it comes to delivering your regular content. That being said, don’t be afraid to experiment with new platforms from time to time—you might be surprised how much organic reach you get!

Investing in Paid Advertising Strategies

Only 22% of marketers feel that their marketing content efforts are successful, and a large portion of this is due to promotion.

According to Moz, “Promotion is the step where most companies fail at content marketing. They either think their job is done when they’ve built it (but no one comes) or they put it on their social channels and wait for the accolades (and conversions) to roll in.”

This is how many businesses fall into the trap of believing that organic content alone will automatically be seen just because it’s been posted online when in fact, paid advertising is necessary to get their message out to the world.

Some different social media and digital advertising methods to consider are:

• Facebook Promoted Posts or Facebook Business (Ads), which respectively allow you to boost an organic post or target your audience based on different demographics. Here’s a guide to how much these ads can really cost you.
• Promoted Tweets are a cost-effective way to target your audience according to specified demographics.
• With Instagram Ads, you can create a more visual advertising campaign to engage your audience.
• Search ads, display ads, and video ads are all different types of visual digital marketing that can effectively increase your visibility online.

Paid promotions and advertisement on any online digital channel can deliver the results you want, as long as you’re using the right channel for your business’ audience. Remember, you need to be where your customers are. If you’re advertising on Instagram, but the majority of your customers only have Facebook, you might briefly increase your reach but chances are the results won’t be as successful as if you directed your efforts to the proper channel.

Combining Organic and Paid Tactics

As you’re integrating paid promotions into your overall marketing strategy, don’t forget about the organic tactics! Paid campaigns should supplement the engagement from your organic content. For example, a blog post that didn’t perform well organically likely won’t be successful even if it’s boosted by paid advertisements.

Many social media channels have now become a “pay to play” arena. The average social media user is exposed to anywhere from 1,500 to 15,000 stories every time they log into Facebook alone—and most people also have Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and numerous other social media profiles.

Your content might not organically break through the noise on its own to get the attention it deserves. It’s safe to say that a combination of organic content supplemented with paid strategies can increase your reach and help you achieve your desired marketing goals.

Capitalize on your target audiences and actively engage prospects across all available channels with our result-driven ad campaigns that target your customers when and where they spend their time online. At Pulse ISM, our seasoned team of strategists work with you to design an effective Digital Advertising strategy focused on your success. Give us a call at (913) 662-1405 or visit our website for more information or to set up a consultation.