Own Your Game

“Before I get started, I want to give you a top-line overview of how search engines and Social Media sites ie: Facebook, make their money. They need people to keep returning to their sites so that they can make money by serving advertisements, but if they only show ads then the users will stop coming back and businesses will stop paying to appear there.

Users are essentially the product. You can compare it to radio stations or free TV. If they don’t have listeners or viewers, they can’t sell advertisements. They aim to strike a happy medium between the main content (i.e. the shows) and the advertisements.

As a business you need to know how to get seen by those users!

Both paid advertising and organic marketing have their place, and this applies whether you’re talking about search engines and social media or whether you’re talking about television and radio.

When it comes to Internet Marketing,

Paid Advertising:

• paid advertising is generally used for ‘impulse sales’ or ‘interrupt marketing’ and targets people who are already ‘aware’ 
• instant visibility and potentially results depending on how much you are prepared to pay
• you have to continually ‘pay to play’ if you want results. Stop paying and your no longer there.

Organic Marketing: 

• informs and educates searches and visitors about your brand, products and services before making the sale ‘engagement marketing’ and ‘referral marketing’ and targets people at all stages of the buying cycle
• refers to the process of bringing in non-paid traffic, including free traffic from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo or social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.
• slower and more expensive to set-up but recurring costs are minimal and results are sustainable
• generates recurring, targeted traffic to a page through a one-time setup cost, such as the time it takes to write and post a blog update.

When your watching television, are you more likely to pay attention to the show (the content) or to the ads?

A well-planned online strategy needs to incorporate organic marketing if you don’t want to continually pay to drive traffic to your own website.”