Paid (PPC) vs organic traffic (SEO) | Discover the difference and achieve your business goals

Recently, in this blog, we published an article in which we talked about Eric Rives' growth drivers. In today's article we're focusing on the paid growth driver, in order to compare it with another growth driver that we've added to his list, the organic growth driver (PPC vs SEO). 

Let's review... the paid growth driver is about investing money in marketing (either digital or traditional) to acquire new customers and monetize each of these new customer acquisitions with a positive profit margin that allows us to reinvest in marketing strategies. This way, what we achieve is a circle in which the more we invest, the higher the profit and therefore the faster our growth as a company will be. 

Now, there are many companies that fail to create a paid growth driver. Some of the reasons for this to happen are: they have very low margins that don't allow them to generate significant reinvestment, they have a very long payback or they just don't know how to do it. 

That's why we want to talk about other growth drivers, these are the organic growth drivers. Let's take a look…

What is an organic growth driver?

Unlike the paid growth driver, with this growth driver we do not invest money in marketing strategies, such as advertising in digital channels, but we generate strategies to obtain customers organically. 

These strategies can be the creation of content in social media, traffic strategies to our website through a blog, the use of keywords, among others. In these cases we have a much higher margin because the cost of acquiring each customer is very low, since we are not investing money to get them. However, the process is much slower. To be clear, this is not really a pure growth driver, as it does not allow us to grow in a sustained way. 

It is not a growth driver in itself, because it does not allow you to reinvest. 

Rather than an organic growth driver, we could talk about organic channels instead, which of course are very useful but they should be seen more as a complement to our growth and not as a driver in itself. 

What are the advantages of using organic channels? 

Organic channel strategies can be very beneficial to our company. They can help us to: 

• Reduce the cost of customer acquisition. 

• They can be very useful when we are just starting our business and we don't have much money to invest. Carrying out organic diffusion strategies, such as a referral campaign, will help us to get our first sales and then invest in marketing. 

• These strategies also help to position our brand and consolidate it in the minds of our potential customers. 

• They are economical and sustainable strategies. 

All this looks great so far. But again, we shouldn’t rely exclusively on these strategies for our business growth. 

Why shouldn't we rely solely on organic channels?

Relying exclusively on organic channels for our growth can be very dangerous, not only because growth is quite a bit slower but because by not investing the money we are making in our business organically in paid channels, we cannot validate if our business model is viable to enter a paid growth driver that will allow us to grow in a sustained manner. 

Also at some point, inevitably, if we don't invest in paid channels our business will stall. Organic channel strategies are sustainable and economical sources of revenue for our business, but they are very difficult to scale. That is why we must complement them with strategies in paid channels and not depend exclusively on them. 

What are the advantages of the paid growth driver?

Once we understand that organic channels should be our allies but that we cannot depend exclusively on them, let's see what are the main advantages of investing in acquisition marketing to make our business grow. 

• It allows us to grow faster. 

• It allows us to grow steadily over time.

• It helps us to analyze clearly where there’s room for  improvement in order to continue optimizing the process. 

• It allows us to analyze which channels are worth investing in and which are not. 

• We are able to foresee certain situations and amplify our communication channels when we see they’ve saturated.  

• With the amount of paid channels there are today, we can reach a huge number of people at a low cost. 

• We can personalize the message and segment to best reach each potential customer. 

• Paid channels are very flexible, we can adapt the campaigns according to the needs of our company.

• We can reinvest the money we generate ourselves, without the need to seek cash injections from investors. 

•  Paid channels are very effective and they allow us to measure all of our actions in order to improve them.

As you can see, the advantages are obvious. Of course, there is no such thing as black and white. We must think of paid strategies and organic strategies as two great complements that will help us to maximize our business. 

Feel free to share this article with your colleagues. And you ... Have you come up with any other advantages when thinking about these strategies? We would love to hear what you think about it.