The need for speed — as far as results from your digital marketing are concerned — is undeniable. It’s easy to see the general appeal for paid traffic with platforms such as Facebook and Google. And it’s easy to put organic traffic in a low priority.
How much easier can paid traffic get, right?
Just put up an ad for a targeted audience (on Facebook) or throw in a bunch of keywords your potential customers might be using to search for your business (on Google), and you are good to go.
It feels like a faucet: When you want results (like leads and sales), all you have to do is to open the “faucet” and you’ll have a Tsunami of results pouring in.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while now, you know that none of that is true. In fact, it’s almost deceptive how easy it might seem to go and launch campaigns on Google or Facebook.
Deceptive it is; easy it isn’t.
If you aren’t careful enough, you could soon lose thousands of dollars with your paid ads and have nothing to show for all that money.
Either you work with professionals to make sure your paid traffic campaigns work or you should start with a solid content marketing strategy first (which can also be an awesome foundation to your paid campaigns later).
We are assuming that you don’t want to waste your ad dollars, that you want your marketing to work for you, and that the last thing you want is to have marketing dollars unaccounted for or with no results to show for all the time, money, and effort you took.
For that reason, here are a few reasons why you should seriously consider organic traffic to your websites and/or landing pages:
Sweat & tears = Long-term potential
The key to making your content marketing work is to produce content on a consistent basis. On schedule, for a long time.
Mediocre content won’t help, so you’d have to create exceptional content to make it work for your business and to stand out from the avalanche of content that’s flooding the Internet as you read this.
Creating organic content doesn’t take money (at least not directly). If you can write, you’d only have to spend time and efforts to get started with blogging, content marketing, content curation, and to create various forms of other content such as Infographics, podcasts, and Youtube videos.
If you can’t write (or don’t want to), you might have to hire writers, content strategists, or bloggers who can help create content for you on an ongoing basis (and this, you’ll need).
Once you create a piece of content, it works to get you traffic for a long time to come. So the investment you are making (in the form of time and effort or in terms of money) will pay off over the years to come, often on a compounding basis.
Content marketing as almost free money
Initially, content marketing could be unforgiving, back-breaking, and undeniably boring.
It takes a lot of effort to create content and then to distribute content on an on-going basis.
However, once your content starts getting readership or viewership or both, you start getting traffic to your websites or landing pages every single day, forever and ever.
See this example sourced from Klipfolio. Just how much money do you think you’d have had to invest in Facebook ad campaigns or Google ad campaigns to get about 325,000 people to your website?
Think about it.
Source: Klipfolio
Over the years of working to produce content, optimizing each piece of content for SEO, and simultaneously sharing or distributing your content on social media will start attracting visitors to your website on a daily basis. Eventually, good content marketing has positive payoffs.
If you do it well enough, the traffic you’ll be able to receive on your website and/or landing pages could be staggeringly more than you’d ever hope to receive with paid campaigns.
Content marketing is more trustworthy than ads
Content — in any of its formats such as text, text + images, or video + images + text — helps build up trust. Since you develop content with the intention to educate, train, inspire, coach, or to inform, you establish authority. Your readers or viewers learn from you while you help them make informed decisions.
All that content, on an ongoing basis, can help build trust in you (or your brand) which breaks down the friction your potential customers have before they whip our wallets out of our pockets.
Do content marketing well enough and you’d have customers for life. Compared to ads which can only bring you results for as long as the campaigns are on, content marketing is a long-term game and can bring you customers, forever.
Further, content marketing working backstage while your advertising puts up the game face on the front allows your potential target audiences to see the full picture behind your paid ads, if they want to (and most people will want to see what’s behind the ad).
Organic growth: Content marketing has other benefits too
With ads, it’s as simple as it gets. Ads point to landing pages or funnels where you’ll generate leads. You’ll then nurture those leads over time until they purchase.
Depending on how your products and services are, you could sell again and again or maybe just once per customer.
Either way, ads have a linear path.
Content marketing — thanks to all the types of content you’ll produce — isn’t linear. In fact, there are many possible positive outcomes with content marketing.
While you can use your blog (or company blog) for direct benefits such as to grow your email list or push traffic on to other pages or your own sales funnels, there are indirect benefits such as getting book deals, being asked to speak at events, or being invited to podcasts.
Here’s an example: NomadicMatt is a travel blogger. After blogging for several years, he had the opportunity to sign book deals.
Side benefits like that can help boost your credibility, help establish authority, and help you to build your brand.
If you think about it, you could never hope to get to speak at events or sign a book deal with an ad now, can you?
We’ve always believed that the best kind of digital marketing is to use all of the available channels available to all of us — content marketing, content curation, social media, email marketing, search optimization, paid traffic, sales funnels, and marketing automation.
You could always pick the best channels that work for you, but ignore one type of channel at the exclusion of something else isn’t doing justice to your marketing efforts.
If you need help with your organic growth strategy, to help manage your paid ad campaigns and more, fill out this form and we’ll get in touch with you pronto.