It's Not Paid vs Organic, It's All Content

I see a lot of debate around the value of paid media vs organic content, whether than be on search or social. Some of these debate participants take a firm stance, seemingly willing to defend their take until the end of time.

While I’ve never viewed paid and organic channels as competitors, they used to exist as siloed efforts in my mind. Disparate mediums that required different teams, strategies, and skills.

However, as I continue to work with clients analyzing data, and developing new strategies, my beliefs are starting to shift. I’m beginning to adopt the view that all marketing is centered around content, and paid search, organic social, etc… are all just different means of distribution.

Despite my traditional focus being paid media, over the past few months I’ve helped clients with projects like writing video scripts, developing organic social posts, creating landing pages, and other more typical “content marketing” initiatives. When working on these projects, I’ve been forced to think about the desired audience for each piece of content, and what would resonate best with those groups of people.

As a result, I’ve been spending more time focusing on how to communicate with potential customers than I have making adjustments in Google Ads or Meta. Despite this, paid media performance has improved for each of my clients over the past few months. One example of this is the case study that I shared previously which outlines how customer research led to a shift in offers that ultimately drove a significant improvement in campaign performance.

In my own recent experience, dedicating time to better understanding solid marketing principles has helped my clients to make more progress than months of platform tinkering in previous agency roles.

Building out content that resonates well with a targeted audience is usually a safe bet to drive performance.

For example, If I work with a client to write up a LinkedIn post that’s published organically, it might generate a decent volume of leads/engagement/etc.., but it will take some time. Whereas, if we boost that post to our intended audience, we’ll lose out on the financial savings, but decrease the time it takes to generate the results we’re looking for.

As automation and AI continue to make the in-platform work easier, I’m doubling down on becoming a better marketer instead of trying to keep up with the latest platform specialist trends. This will help to make my skill set more platform and channel agnostic, allowing me to help my clients regardless of how technology evolves in the coming years.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).