Ecommerce

How Organic Marketing Fits into Your Paid Strategy

By Tinuiti Team

Though organic marketing and paid advertising are certainly two different methods for bringing in new leads and business, it’s important you don’t think of them as completely separate entities.

Instead, consider them two parts of a whole – two gears in your overall, comprehensive marketing machine. When one works well, the other does, too. When one gear won’t turn, it stops the entire mechanism from working altogether.

Both organic and paid efforts are important for modern retailers.

 
When both strategies are fine-tuned and working properly, it makes for an unstoppable, lead-generating strategy that wins you both business and profits.


Combining Organic Marketing With Your Paid Strategy

So, how do you get these two very different strategies set up and working together toward the same goal and what steps can you take to ensure your overall marketing machine is working?

Here’s where to start:

1. Give each strategy a purpose

Here’s an couple examples how you can leverage organic & paid efforts strategically:

On social media, your organic efforts will be used to encourage influencer traction and affirm existing customer loyalty. Your paid efforts can help you expand your reach and draw in new qualified leads.

BLOG POST: “Facebook Paid Ads & Organic Marketing for Brands”

On your website, your organic efforts can help you rank highly in Google, maps and other search tools. Your paid efforts can help you remarket to previous shoppers who might have abandoned their cart or browsed your site before.

Giving each channel and strategy a goal like this ensures you cover every angle of the marketing process.

“Initially the organic side of Facebook was a huge driver of revenue, especially back in the day before Facebook changed the algorithm. Companies had more exposure and there was a lot less competition,” Jakob Bechgaard, Digital Marketing Manager at Knockaround, LLC said in a recent interview.

“Now, there are so many businesses competing for inventory. As Facebook changed the way its algorithm and advertising worked – we got less and less exposure from our organic Facebook efforts. This was when our Facebook paid advertising efforts became really important.”

2. Get your messaging in line

Though the goal of each strategy may be slightly different, they’re still marketing the same brand – and that means they should have the same voice, the same personality and the same messaging.

Consistency is key across all channels and strategies.

3. Find ways for the two to work together

Whenever you can find a way for your efforts to work in tandem, capitalize on it. Hashtags, for example, offer a great way to boost the efficacy of both your efforts. Use a hashtag in a sponsored tweet, and then have your social managers use that same hashtag throughout your daily posts to drum up more interest in the topic.

Practical Ecommerce
Credit: Practical Ecommerce

You can do the same with a current or trending topic to get both your paid and organic efforts more visibility. Finding similar ways to integrate your two strategies can often improve the results of both.

“Make sure you are doing as much as you possibly can to connect the dots from social to purchases. Don’t expect social traffic to quickly convert — if you haven’t already, you must develop a rock solid strategy for capturing “micro-moments” from social visitors, such as account registrations, email opt-ins, and retargeting pixels.”

– Peter Messmer, Director of Growth at AddShoppers

4. Offer what the other strategy can’t

Your paid ads can show off great photos, videos and copy, but they can’t be interactive, so use your organic marketing strategies to fill in that gap. Use questions, contests, surveys and other similar tactics to really engage users in an active and exciting way.

Leverage this excitement to build customer loyalty and create brand ambassadors. Then, use your paid strategies to do the more passive marketing.

5. Boost high-performing posts

If you’ve already got a great organic post going, why not use paid advertising to amplify it and improve those results even more? Facebook’s Boost feature is a great way to get more traction out of already great posts.

Best of all, you can set a super detailed target audience to ensure you only reach exactly who you want.

6. Use what you’ve learned from organic marketing to better your ads.

Over time, you’ll start to see what posts resonate better with users in your target demo. Certain words or phrases might get better traction than others, or a certain style of image might get more clicks.

You can use this data you gather to improve your paid advertising efforts as well. Watch the metrics, monitor what works and doesn’t, and use that data to improve both sides of your marketing strategy.

It’s a win-win for everybody. At the end of the day, both strategies are working toward the same goal, so let them work off each other. Let them fill in the gaps where the other falls short, and let them lend a hand when one isn’t delivering up to its potential. It will mean better results across the board.

To learn more about how organic marketing can work together with your paid advertising strategies, email [email protected].

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