Marketer’s choice: Paid or organic? It’s both.

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It’s Friday evening and you’re done with work. You meet your friends, but you don’t know where to go for dinner. This happens a lot.

You turn to your most well-connected friend for recommendations. He says, “There’s this place downtown. The food’s great!”

Imagine if he was paid by the restaurant to say exactly that. And for every person he brings, he gets a dollar. That’s paid marketing.

Common examples of paid marketing are banners, Facebook Ads, or buying keywords on search engines like Google.

According to Tune, a US mobile marketing solution provider with about a decade of experience, the marriage of paid and organic marketing is powerful. Organic marketing could refer to owned media like websites and social media handles, and unpaid publicity like search rankings and word-of-mouth advertising.

When done right, it can “reveal opportunities to optimize customer acquisition, amplify brand equity, and maximize overall return on investment (ROI),” says the company in its ebook, The Elements of Paid and Organic Marketing.

“It just takes some testing and tweaking to get right,” writes Tune.

Paid marketing for higher visibility in a mobile age

Is there a balance, then? Digital marketing executives who spoke with Tech in Asia agreed that it’s not so much a “right balance” as it is a “right-now balance.”

These days, even ecommerce sites like Asos and Zalora have their own content to up their organic traffic game.

“We don’t usually put a ratio to it. It only comes in when we have a competing budget for mass media versus online advertising,” shares Fiona, a digital marketer at a media and publishing company in Singapore.

“But organic traffic is obviously important. These days, even ecommerce sites like Asos and Zalora have their own content to up their organic traffic game,” says the 27-year-old, who requested that her last name be withheld.

So how can startups find their footing? According to Tune’s ebook, they have to begin by understanding the consumer ecosystem.

Mixing paid and organic search in the mobile age is even more important.
While our appetite for information increases, screen sizes decrease – a smaller screen displays fewer links. Paid marketing allows for first-page visibility.

Moreover, 2009 research from the University of Twente in the Netherlands indicates that 91 percent of searchers do not go past the first page of the results. Of that percentage, over half stick to just the first three results.

91 percent of searchers do not go past the first page of the results.

Samantha Lim, a 32-year-old digital marketing executive in Singapore agrees that paid marketing helps boost brand visibility. Lim, who has Google Analytics Individual Qualification and AdWords certification, explains that finding a balance between the two is difficult for companies because of two factors: changing needs and budget concerns.

Say you’ve been experiencing low organic traffic this month and you expect the slowdown to bleed into the next. Paid marketing can revive the traffic. By paying for a spot on a page, it gives your product or service constant exposure, and the repetition boosts brand recall among consumers. In contrast, relying solely on organic marketing might result in irregular traffic and lower brand visibility.

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How an organic foundation helps paid marketing

But before shelling out money for paid marketing, most companies should build a strong organic foundation. This means that their sites or apps should be optimized for search engines.

Companies insert keywords (or meta-tags) in the code, and search engines rank site relevance based on these keywords. That’s called organic traffic, and it requires a team to track user behavior round the clock.

Being on top of your game in organic marketing is important for many reasons, and chief among them is the lower cost. A company with a solid organic marketing plan relies less on paid marketing.

The Tune report adds, “[Having both paid and organic marketing] increases return on ad spend… Brands that win at organic marketing are primed to win at paid, and companies that rely solely on paid marketing tend to run out of cash.”

Moreover, consumers trust organic marketing more. In a 2015 Nielsen Global Trust Survey, 66 percent of respondents said they trust earned media (publicity gained via promotions) in the form of newspaper articles and editorial content.

Blending paid and organic marketing

Even if a fresh-on-the-scene startup excels at organic marketing, consumers often perceive new brands as risky. They’re not willing to jump ship – at least, not immediately. Paid marketing can then come in and anchor the brand deeper in consumers’ minds. This is pivotal to building organic inquiries, according to Jason Parks, president of The Media Captain, a digital marketing agency.

“Paid ads have been a big reason for the constant uptick in organic because people will hit our website, drop off, remember the brand name, then conduct an organic search,” he notes. According to Parks, it’s only after this process that people “convert.”

“Paid marketing might help your company’s name worm itself into organic conversations,” suggests Ying Tiun, a London-based account director at Hylink Digital Solutions.

“It’s keywords-based. If I bid for ‘leather jacket’ and a customer searches for that and sees my brand, they might associate my brand with leather jackets and bring it up in a conversation with their friends later.”

Tune research found that organic SEO combined with paid search advertisements boosted revenue up to 30 percent. One ecommerce platform saw revenue increase over 800 percent, showing results from both paid marketing and organic searches.

Alison Passat, a New York-based digital supervisor at media brand Blue 449, said free organic marketing was an anomaly born from disruptive innovations. She stresses the need to invest in both your brand and the organic content you post.

“Think of organic as the base of your brand, and paid as the best of your brand,” she advises.

The modern marketing ecosystem is complex and abundant with choices. Digital marketers have plenty of tools at their disposal to help them decide what works for the company at different times.

Download The Elements of Paid and Organic Marketing for free here. Read more about paid and organic marketing, what tools you can use for both, and how to best optimize them for your company.