PPC vs organic marketing – which is better? With PPC – pay per click, you pay an advertising platform such as Google Adwords for clicks on your adverts. When someone clicks they go through to your website. Traffic is pretty instant and you immediately find out whether you can make your campaign work financially, assuming you track all your sales. This can take some time and investment, but you can also set a daily budget you can afford so you can test out various adverts and find which ones work the best.
With organic marketing it’s a much slower strategy. You don’t get immediate results and you often need to spend time creating content before you can track your results. Blogging or v’logging are examples of organic marketing. Over time as your “digital footprint” grows, you can get traffic for free. This is especially good if your content gets ranked on Google or goes viral. However, this can take months or years before this happens, or it may never happen! In the meantime you can spend a lot of time creating content which doesn’t convert website visitors into buyers. See also niche blogging for profit for a blogging strategy.
PPC Vs Organic Marketing – Scalability
So depending on your own personal situation, you may want to spend more time creating content to generate free traffic over several months. Alternatively, if you’re too busy for content creation, use PPC campaigns to get traffic immediately to your website. Test and measure your advertising and find a strategy which is profitable.
Once you get to this stage you can scale up very quickly with PPC. Simply increase your daily budget once profitable. You immediately get more visitors, subscribers and sales – if you’ve done your homework first with a smaller budget.
Organic marketing doesn’t offer such a scalable strategy. With organic marketing if a certain article is performing, you can’t necessarily replicate its success with other content. However, you can run paid marketing to the content which is working for you. So over time you can combine your PPC and content marketing strategies for the best outcome – more on this later.
PPC Vs Organic – Competition
If your business is in a very competitive niche, you may find content marketing is very difficult. In a less competitive niche you can more easily get the attention of the search engines and rank your content for your main keywords.
But in a very competitive field this is incredibly difficult. There are tens of thousands of other websites competing for the keywords you’re aiming for with your content. So getting traffic from content marketing in a competitive field can be a very long term project. There’s no guarantees with SEO either (search engine optimisation) and many content marketers give up after months of hard work.
In a competitive field too, paid marketing is very expensive because other advertisers are paying for top listings. So you can either pay for advertising your business or potentially spend months or years fighting to optimise your website and get ranked for some of your keywords.
Combining PPC & Organic Marketing
As a compromise you can combine both PPC and organic marketing. You can also choose your budget when using PPC so it’s an affordable option for most businesses whatever your budget it.
Once you have created content on your website, you can use Google’s Adwords platform to target your content with a dynamic advert. The dynamic advert automatically searches your website for suitable content and creates dynamic ads which showcase appropriate content and matches it to Google search traffic.
You can also target your best performing content once you know which website articles are the best at converting visitors into subscribers/customers.
Summary
Some business models and niches are better suited to using PPC because they are in competitive niches. With a competitive niche, you can really struggle getting the traction you need through only using organic marketing. It can take years! In a competitive niche paid advertising can be expensive so you’ll need a good business model to make it profitable.
In a less competitive niche, you can make organic marketing work really well if you’re prepared to put the effort in and create a lot of content. But this doesn’t happen overnight and many content marketers will spend months or years creating content in order to get free traffic. Many will quit after several months when nothing seems to be happening!
In general, think of organic marketing as a much longer term strategy. PPC is good because you can get traffic very quickly and scale it up once profitable.
See also PPC affiliate marketing for beginners.