When looking to gain brand awareness, website traffic, and, ultimately, new customers, there are two ways to do it: organic advertising or paid advertising. But, what is the difference between the two? Which advertising should you choose? This blog post has all you need to know about organic and paid advertising.
What is Organic Advertising?
Organic advertising can really be summed up as any kind of advertising you don’t pay for. This includes Instagram and Facebook posts, tweeting on Twitter, or using any other social media platform. The key to organic advertising is to be creative. You need to know when and where to reach your ideal audience. Creating the appropriate content and posting on platforms where your audience is likely to be active is crucial to making organic advertising work.
Organic advertising can also refer to organic search traffic. This means your website is generating clicks from search engines such as Google without you having to pay for that exposure.
What is Paid Advertising?
On the other hand, there is paid advertising. This is more straightforward than organic advertising; basically, paid advertising is any advertising that is paid for. Simple enough, right? This includes posts you pay to boost on Facebook or Instagram, ad space you’ve bought on Google, or even pre-rolls on video sites like Youtube. Paid advertising tends to get your ads seen by the exact audience you’re looking to target without having to do as much work. This, however, is out of reach for a lot of small businesses and even if they do have the budget, they can easily waste it by not understanding the workings of Google Ads or Facebook ads.
Which is Better?
Now, let’s look at the pros and cons of each. The upside to organic advertising is it requires essentially no budget. Your bank can use all the free features of social media to increase brand awareness and gain an audience. Unfortunately, this will cost you some time — quite a bit of time, actually. It can take several hours each week to create the best content for your social media accounts or blog in order to hit the right audience. Not to mention, you’ll need to invest time in SEO in order to drive traffic from search engines.
What about paid advertising? The number one benefit of paid advertising is control. Your bank can choose what messages it wants what audience to see and where that audience sees it.
This allows campaigns to be much more targeted and lead to increased ROI. However, it will cost you. Luckily, as mobile devices become increasingly popular, this option isn’t as far out of reach for small banks and businesses as it once was. A marketing budget of any size can get the ball rolling on a paid advertising campaign so you can begin to see results quickly.
So, which should you choose? The best option would be a combination of both. Spending just a few hours a week on social media can increase the size of your audience without having to spend a penny of your marketing budget. However, if there is a budget available, combining paid advertising with organic advertising is the best way to increase brand awareness and customer acquisition quickly and efficiently. Basically, that’s all you need to know about organic and paid advertising but you can always explore more and get in depth knowledge in this area.
