Content marketing is now more important than ever. It’s no longer a
nice-to-have; it’s a must-have. Things change so fast that it can be
sometimes difficult to keep up with the trend. Today, businesses are all
about content marketing. From small to medium enterprises to
multinational conglomerates, marketers are now creating and
disseminating content through digital channels, such as social media
networks, newsletters, blogs, video blogs, and more. Businesses are
moving publishing, instead of advertising. But the challenge is to
create valuable and unique content that goes beyond words. Content
marketing is a means to revenue, so it’s imperative that businesses
create on an ongoing basis. But before diving into the content marketing
practices, it’s important to understand the relationship and difference
between organic content and paid content. Think of them as two
different tools to achieve different results. Let’s take a look at the
two marketing strategies.
What is Organic Content?
Organic content, as the name suggests, refers to just any content you
produce that is not paid but strictly natural content that’s found
primarily by users through keywords search. The quality of your content
is one of the most important factors in search ranking algorithms for
both organic and paid search. Organic content marketing refers to the
way search engines like Google find the most relevant results to the
user’s search query through a keyword. Organic content is purely driven
by the relevance of the matches to the keyword that the user entered,
and not influenced by any kind of payment made to the search engine by
marketers. Organic content is a content marketing technique designed to
increase the visibility of your content through marketing channels that
wouldn’t require a direct payment. Organic content marketing is a
crucial part of a content marketing campaign.
What is Paid Content?
Paid content refers to just any target-specific content that is paid
for. Paid content is designed specifically to attract quality traffic
and leads from a highly specific audience. Remember seeing those
“sponsored” tags in your social media news feed? That is paid content.
Many advertisers or marketers prefer paid over organic content marketing
for instant results – you pay only when users click your ad, not when
they just view your ad. Moreover, you can also customize your target
audience pool as well as the message but that would require some
up-front costs. Paid search also provides more precision and total
control over what your listing says, which allows you to qualify
searchers so that only the relevant users click through. Unlike organic
content, paid content offers more control over your message so that the
message can be used to directly target the searchers without worrying
about what the search engines want.
Difference between Organic and Paid Content
Meaning
Organic content refers to just any content that’s created without paid
promotion meaning it is strictly natural content that’s found primarily
by users through keywords search. It is a content marketing technique
designed to increase the visibility of your content through marketing
channels that wouldn’t require a direct payment.
Paid content, on the contrary, refers to just any content that is paid
for meaning you must pay for the content to view the content. Paid
content is an effective marketing technique aimed at a highly specific
audience.
Target Audience
Whereas both organic and paid content are effective content marketing
strategies that allow you to target users (or searchers) by their
interests or preferences, paid content is more reliable that provides
more precision.
Paid content marketing allows you to show your content to a more
specific targeted audience who will find the content more useful and
relevant. Paid content isolates transactional users ready to buy and
identifies users by their characteristics such as geographical location,
demographic and behavioral factors.
Control
One of the major key differences between organic and paid content
marketing is control. Paid content allows marketers to have total
control over the message and what it says, which allows them to qualify
users so that only the interested and the right ones click through.
Whereas the users who view the content from the search results can be
classified as prospective customers, paid content can be directly
targeted at users without even worrying about what the search engines
want. It’s the ability to control your message that makes it
distinguishable from organic content marketing channel.
Dependability
Marketers prefer paid content over organic content because it attracts
quality traffic and leads, and instant results. However, the paid
content marketing efforts do not work across all search engines meaning
an ad listed by Google does not appear on Bing or Microsoft, for that
matter.
Organic search techniques, on the contrary, work across all search
engines, which means whatever you do to improve your ranking through
keywords in Google will probably reflect in Bing as well.
Summary of Organic Content and Paid Content
While organic search is designed to increase the visibility of your
content for an improved online experience without spending any money on
ad space, paid content is designed to attract quality traffic and leads
from a highly specific audience through paid search efforts, such as
search engine ads and social media campaigns. With paid search, you pay
only when users click the ad, but not when they just view it. Paid
search provides total control over your message which allows you to
customize your target audience pool so that only the relevant users
click through. However, the most effective way for organic and paid
content marketing efforts to work together is by promoting a
well-structured, unique content.