Assessing the marketing strategy for your business can be daunting. Small businesses with limited budgets look to optimize their stack for organic traffic to save themselves from another monthly bill, but can a new company with expenditures remain viable in a marketplace without at least minimally advertising their business? In considering a paid vs. organic approach, it brings to mind the age old question: what came first, the chicken or the egg?
In starting a business it is easy to allow your mind to wander down the path of earning massive amounts of organic traffic on your website, but how will you go about doing that? To build a truly organic audience takes an enormous amount of time and effort. You will need to update content on your website constantly. You will need to manage social media accounts and be incredibly active (and relevant!) with your content. You will need to reach out to individuals and ask them for a follow. And after you build this audience you have to keep it. Indeed it is an arduous process, and if you put a dollar value on your time – a very expensive process.
Great optimization plans, on average, take between 4 and 6 months to begin providing results. So ask yourself, can you wait that long to start seeing results from the work you will be putting in? It is also fair to honestly consider at this moment in time if the plan you have devised is truly a great plan that will show results in the 4-6 month window, or could it take longer?
On the other hand, properly built and targeted advertising campaigns can help you to build an audience that, once obtained, will add to your organic reach. With social media campaigns you can target broad swaths of people with limited funds and entice them to follow your account. Once they are followers of your account you can reach them organically through social media posting. Similarly, using search engine marketing will allow your business to show up at the top of the search results immediately (as opposed to waiting for your optimization plan to bear fruit) spreading awareness and driving traffic to your website. As a benefit to your paid conversions, this process also increases your relevancy within the search engine and helps to speed up your optimization plan.
Paid processes begin to produce results almost immediately, and take very little time and effort to set up. As soon as your advertisement is created it will go into a review period, which typically takes less than 24 hours. Once approved the advertisement will begin serving to prospective clients and driving traffic to the pages you link in your campaign. Of course, spending money is a risk. There is no guarantee that the traffic you will generate will result in sales. It is best to enlist the help of an experienced marketer to help set the parameters for your campaign to achieve the optimal result. A marketer will understand how to research the organic traffic you already have to produce an audience that is more likely to convert on your site.
As you can see, much like the cycle of life in which the egg produces a chicken and a chicken produces an egg, paid and organic strategies are often times reliant on each other to some degree and both help to foster an audience. There are clear benefits to both and depending on what you value more (time or money) either could be right initial step for you on your pathway to success. Regardless of the first step you choose, it is likely that, to remain competitive in the market you will ultimately end up using both.