Organic VS. Paid Marketing Promotions

Have you ever heard about the rule of 7 in marketing?!

Long story short, the rule of 7 is defined as to be heard, seen, or interacted with at least seven times before the customer takes action to buy your product or service.

Another rule is the 5% rule in business, and it states the following: if you are a start-up, you will need to spend around 15 to 25% annually of your capital money on marketing. And while your business grows, this percentage will be reduced until it becomes stable at 5% of your total profit in B2B business and a little more- around 8%- in B2C business. Considering both rules, you start thinking, where should I spend the money on advertising and marketing? Organic or paid? The following lines have your handbook to perform the best business marketing promotions.

The most effective organic promotion channels:

To know which road to take, you need to understand first the difference in applying the best practice in paid and organic marketing promotions. Let’s start by listing the organic channels and how they can work:

1-SEO & SEM marketing:

Let’s talk about advantages and disadvantages; search engine optimization and search engine marketing take time to show results. It seems like a disadvantage, but on the other hand, when it starts working (after 3 to 6 months of work), the results are incredible. It gets you your accurate target audience, and you appear in the organic search results to customers.

SEO & SEM are long-term investments, so it must be a calculated step to take as you won’t see the desired effect before a decent amount of time. And it’s an organic step as you won’t pay a cent to Google, Facebook, or any other platform. You have to put effort into optimizing your website, its’ internal links, content audit, and blogs with the exact keywords researched for page better authority results.

2-E-mail campaign:

According to marketing metrics, e-mail campaigns are the most effective marketing method, especially for B2B businesses. It grants you the proper brand positioning, and it enables you to insert multiple calls to action so your customer is hooked into your loop of digital platforms.

Plus, it’s a reminder that you are here for them, they open to check their mail for school or daily business tasks, and they find you in the inbox. Their eyes will see you at least more than 7 times per month.

3-Social media / Content marketing:

Social media is an ocean of possibilities; you have to seize the perfect moment and exist almost all the time.

There are many social platforms, and according to your business, you can choose the right platforms for your brand’s existence. But all platforms have the exact steps of the buyer journey. You have to start raising the brand awareness first, then attract your customers’ interest and develop it to engagement, and the rightful engagement process will grant the action crown.

To drive this process most properly, you have to be selective in your published content to hit trends and engage with your audience and deliver the right message needed.

4-live promotions (Events/ webinars):

Close to the eye, close to the heart. That is what you achieve through marketing with live videos or webinars. Being present at events or creating an event of your own is the best method to achieve your brand positioning in the head of your users. It’s also a powerful PR tactic used by some in the marketing field to increase the talking news about your brand resulting in further exposure.

5-Influencer marketing:

Over the previous decade, influencer marketing has proved that it’s one of the top game winners in the marketing field. An influencer is followed by many people who trust and love the way he spends his life.

Influencer marketing is working with marketing experts who can drive a branded idea that will touch the hearts & souls of its’ audience, and they may work with celebrities or other influencers to support their point of view.

Examples for influencer marketing campaigns, recently in Egypt is done by Beyti Tropicana with the content influencer Khalid Mokhtar who asked his followers to choose fruits for the new cocktail, and then he launched a video announcing the new drink by Beyti:

Nescafe did another influencer marketing campaign example. They didn’t bring an influencer to do it by making college majors into influencing and engaging tools. They did a hugely successful campaign from the start point of targeting. They knew that most of the ones who buy Nescafe are college students who stay up late to study or drink it to withstand the long boring lectures. They took the concept and performed any easy captivating jingle and encourage other professions to do the same:

The result was a massive difference in brand engagement and a tremendous difference in sales.

One last example of an eCommerce application influencer marketing is Breadfast application campaign done by the famous creatives Hesham Afifi and Kareem Magdi, they didn’t only use themselves in the ads but also they drove a pain campaign talking about the suffering of buying stuff from the supermarket, and of course, it went viral:

6- word of mouth:

The all-time best way of marketing to a direct call to action. On a small scale, after finishing the 4 steps your customer takes- awareness, interest, engagement, and action- there is an important step to turn your customer into a loyal customer, then an ambassador for your brand. The follow-up is this step, being an ambassador will automatically refer you to his circle and grant you marketing without paying a dime.

The large scale is PR. PR companies work literally on the word of mouth marketing, making a third party tell others that your service is incredible!! And trust me, it goes viral.

Paid promotions methods:

There are two ways for paid promotions: search engine paid ads (google &youtube) or social media paid ads (Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, etc.).

To perform an accurate digital paid ad campaign, you need to go through the following steps:

1- identifying the proper buyer persona: for perfect targeting, you need to study your customer behaviour, income, needs, and frustrations.

2- set a selling funnel: it’s like a mind map for customers, strangers, new customers, regular customers, and even those who weren’t satisfied by your service.

3-setting goals for your ad campaign: after setting the perfect target audience, you need to place your goals according to your campaign’s objective and where your customer is in his journey.

4- applying the A/B test for your ad campaigns: to further study your audience preferences in content.

5-ads campaign tracking: you keep tracking the ad campaign daily through tracking sheets and tools of analytics to observe for enhancements in the following campaigns.

Talking about the negative side of paid promotions:

1- it has a short-time life; this time is bound to the lifetime of your ad campaign.

2- The results can be excellent, but it’s very tricky to turn the one-time ad campaign into a long-time organic response. You will still have to pay money to make your client into a loyal person.

3- the bid and distribution scores aren’t steady. One day they are on your side, giving you magnificent results, and the other day isn’t that lucky.

4- it has to be dealt with by professional marketers, or you will lose time & money.

So what should I do now? Paid or Organic Marketing?

Consultation should be the answer. Lots of factors determine the method we use in marketing. All the previously mentioned promotions need marketing experts to reach the desired results. We handed you over your handbook to perform the best business marketing promotions but paid, or organic is to be decided on your type of business and the available resources.