What is the Difference Between Paid Traffic and Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic is when people land on your website from finding your business through a natural thoroughfare such as a search engine. Your company hasn’t paid for this promotion. It happens naturally because you ranked well for the keyword people searched for.
Organic traffic may be free, but remember, you get what you pay for. Success from it may come and go and you’re at the mercy of search engine algorithms. Organic traffic is a foundation you should build upon, but not rely on entirely to drive your business forward.
Unlike organic traffic, you can be extremely strategic and control the outcome with paid traffic. Paid traffic is when a person is directed to your website by an ad you paid for. Think of the last thing you typed into Google. Unless it was the lyrics to We Didn’t Start the Fire, you most likely came across ads before the organic results—those are paid traffic ads.
So do you have to focus on just one or the other? Not at all. Your organic traffic should come from a high intent content strategy plan, that makes search engines want to showcase you on the search results page. That’s the start.
Then you need to commit to a paid traffic strategy because the more foot traffic you get from paid advertising the more it will help you rank better organically.
How to Combine Digital Advertising into Inbound Marketing Efforts
Inbound marketing is when you go after qualified leads with a specific approach, rather than creating an ad and shouting, “send it to the internet,” and hope for the best. You’re not looking to blast the masses. Inbound marketing is more about reaching fewer, but more valuable customers.
Outbound marketing, however, has been lovingly coined as the Great Disruptor. It happens anytime you get a pop-up ad, radio commercial, or contextual ad that you didn’t ask for, but get anyway. Rather than entice people to your site with helpful, informative content, you’re pushing to get everyone to your landing pages.
So is digital advertising only for outbound marketing? Not necessarily. It takes work but there is a way to utilize it while adhering to best practices for inbound marketing.
The three things you need to consider when creating your digital advertising campaign are Non-Disruptive, Useful, and Highly-Targeted. Remember, you don’t want to turn off potential consumers by blasting unsolicited content onto their phone screens.
Consider using advertising platforms such as email campaigns or sponsored ads on social media. The first is something a consumer would welcome since they opted-in, and the second usually blends into the experience so it’s less disruptive.
How to Make Your Online Content Work for You
If you haven’t noticed a pattern here it’s that content is key (or king, or queen) to growing your business. Aside from having a great product or service, your content is what matters the most and you need to spend a lot of time on it. The theme of content should never be to push people to buy. That’s what ads are for. Your content works to put you in front of your target audience as a source rather than a sale.
Your content strategy should incorporate a calendar that embodies the point of your content and who you want to target, and when. Remember content strategy is used for different goals (drive leads, build brand awareness, etc.), so decide how you want to break up the year and where your focus should be.
Don’t think of “content” as a wall of text you need to have on your website. Content has a better resume than that. Content is essentially online material, such as images, videos, infographics, social media posts, along with the bigger contenders, such as blog posts, newsletters, and webinars.
The big-time goal here is to provide your audience with educational, informative, or entertaining material. We’re saying “goal” here a lot but we promise unlike “inconceivable,” we know what it means and how it can help your business.
