Paid advertising and organic content distribution are bound to be tactics you include when developing a digital marketing strategy for your business. Paying for targeted ads can introduce more consumers to your offerings, whereas the organic content you produce and share via your company website or social media can help guide those who are already seeking the type of product or service you sell into your sales funnel as warm leads.
Smart businesses leverage the overlap between these methods of reaching their target audiences by integrating the two. From keyword research to engagement data, there are many factors to weigh as you consider how to use both paid and organic content to elevate and maximize your marketing efforts.
Here, 13 members of Forbes Agency Council explore the best ways to ensure the two tactics complement, enhance and inform each other. Before deciding how much of your budget to put toward each, check out their tips below to determine the best mix.
Forbes Agency Council members share smart ways to integrate paid and organic content marketing strategies.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Invest In Research And Analytics Up Front
To define the best organic content topics and secure solid writers to engage your target audience, invest in research and analytics up front. Get organic revved up first so you can glean data from engagement KPIs. Then, fine-tune the content approach by establishing an integrated calendar that incorporates a seamless feel between paid and organic and a cadence for sharing informative content. – Kathleen Lucente, Red Fan Communications
2. Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising To Boost Organic Engagement
Integrating paid and organic content is crucial to increasing engagement with your target audience and conversions. You can boost the organic content that provides more engagement with pay-per-click advertising. Combining both usually allows you to have a better audience understanding, as PPC platform campaign managers offer further information. You should then have a clear path to the right organic content optimizations. – Jordi Marca, Gotoclient
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3. Make Paid Content Less Promotional And As Interesting As Organic
The lines between paid and organic content have become increasingly blurred. Just because an advertorial piece is paid doesn’t mean that it has to be overly promotional. Paid content should be interesting in its own right so that a reader would be just as interested in it as organic content. – Nathan Miller, Miller Ink, Inc.
4. Extend The Reach Of Every Piece Of Organic Content With Paid
One of the best ways for a company to integrate paid with organic is to have a budget allocated to extend the reach of the organic content with paid advertising efforts. Due to evolving social platforms, it’s becoming increasingly harder to reach users using organic marketing; therefore, giving each piece of content an extra push with paid marketing allows you to increase your reach and results. – Jonathan Durante, Expandify Marketing Inc
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5. Target Long-Tail Queries With Dynamic Search Ads
Dynamic search ads integrate paid with organic content by targeting long-tail queries that are unavailable through traditional keyword targeting. With DSAs, you can see which keywords Google deems relevant to your content and reveal content gaps or opportunities for organic support. You can also leverage quality scores and conversion rates to understand opportunities for optimization. – Donna Robinson, Collective Measures
6. Test Social Content Organically First To Inform Paid Strategies
Testing social content organically gives you a good feel for the messaging, creative and content that is resonating with your audience. Then, the most successful organic content can be added to the paid media campaigns. We tend to see better performance with organic content than with advertising content, especially on platforms such as Twitter, Reddit and TikTok. – Gina Michnowicz, The Craftsman Agency
7. Always Create Campaigns And Content Plans In Cohorts
Paid is about getting your audience aware, and once their awareness is yours, it’s your organic content that keeps them coming back for more. Always create campaigns and content plans in cohorts because you want to give an overall message to your end user. This makes you look and feel credible. – Stefan Katanic, Veza Digital
8. Ensure A Clear Relationship Between Paid And Native Content
One of the most important things is to ensure that there is a very clear relationship between the content you pay for and content that looks native to what is being presented on the platform. The main reason for this is that when the content is integrated, it must always be made to look as natural as it can in the process. – Jon James, Ignited Results
9. Analyze Keyword Performance In Paid Ads To Assess SEO Value
It’s difficult to get a sense of the efficacy of a keyword through organic content alone. One of the best ways to determine if a keyword is worth pursuing in your SEO efforts is to analyze its performance in a paid ad. The response your paid ad receives (or doesn’t receive) while using that keyword will clue you in on whether or not your strategy aligns with the interests of your intended audience. – Adam Binder, Creative Click Media
10. Incorporate Media Mentions Into Paid Ad Placements
If you are featured on a television station or your product gets highlighted in a press article, you can then incorporate the TV clip, station logo or highlight from the organic article into a paid ad placement to drive traffic. It’s about knowing your audience and figuring out which types of coverage can be leveraged in paid ads and other placements—you want to get the best return on investment. – Zack Teperman, ZTPR
11. Offer Both Lighter Organic Content And More In-Depth Paid Content
Within the same campaign, offer lighter content, such as blog posts and videos, through organic and more in-depth content, such as webinars and white papers, through paid ads. All campaign content should have a unifying message and imagery that ties it all together. – Wendy Covey, TREW Marketing
12. Repurpose And Pay To Amplify Well-Performing Organic Content
Repurposing well-performing organic content for paid amplification is a good way to get more bang for one’s buck. Analyzing results from organic outreach allows marketers to skip the guessing game when it comes to determining whether or not one’s content is good enough, as it has already been tried and tested. It’s a smarter and more efficient approach for the team, given time and budget constraints. – Lars Voedisch, PRecious Communications
13. Build A Consistent Story Across Paid And Organic Channels
Building a consistent story across paid and organic channels is much easier to do when your marketing teams have awareness of each other’s efforts. Put someone in charge of bringing the information out of silos and creating a unified marketing effort. Make sure that teams have access to the information they need to move in unison and create content that works together to achieve your objectives. – Benjamin Collins, Laughing Samurai
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Author: Expert Panel®, Forbes Councils Member
