When it comes to marketing, most businesses will put everything in the same basket, but realistically, marketing can be broken into two types: Organic Marketing & Paid Marketing. What a lot of small businesses and clients ask us is ‘which one is more important?’. From our experience, we believe both serve a purpose, which is why we want to help you learn how to utilize both, so you can leverage these marketing strategies in your Tasmanian business too!
While both these marketing strategies can work in tandem, it’s important to understand both of them individually in order to get the most out of them. In short, organic marketing engages with your existing followers, builds your authentic brand voice, adds value and enables you to share your story, while paid advertising directs the paid audience (people who otherwise may never know about your brand) to the desired destination for sales conversion or lead generation.
So let’s dig a little deeper with each of these areas of marketing and then we’ll wrap it up at the end, to show you how to get the best of both worlds!

Organic Marketing

Organic marketing allows you to grow your brand’s presence online for FREE!! Coming from a small business, in our opinion, anything that’s free is worthy of some attention! However, although it may be free, it can be costly in terms of your time.
Businesses and brands (both small businesses like a Tasmanian winery, through to large brands like Nike) use organic marketing as a large portion of their marketing strategy. Organic marketing is best used to create ‘awareness’ around your business and brand; be authentic, engage and connect with your audience and create a ‘brand voice’, as well as drive traffic to your website, blogs and landing pages. It gives you a chance to talk to your existing and loyal customers, reminding them why they choose you, but also build a relationship with potential customers at the same time.
Organic marketing can be done through social media posts, videos, infographics, blogs on your website and emails to your mailing list. The organic content that you share on a regular basis will be relevant to your audience, closely aligned to what they care about, adding value that’s related to your products or services, sharing your business day-to-day activities, and information related to your broader industry.
Great brands are built on lasting relationships; when you feel like you’re part of a community of like-minded people, engaging with a brand whose values are aligned with yours. This is why organic marketing works so well, it allows you to grow a loyal audience of ‘raving fans’ at no cost to you!
So why isn’t everyone doing this? You tell me! No, we get it, a lot of small businesses don’t have the time required to manage an organic marketing strategy. What we often see is business owners getting all amped up and keen to start an organic marketing strategy, but don’t have the time or persistence to keep it going. The reality is, organic marketing, although free, takes a considerable amount of effort, creating high-quality and engaging content isn’t a five minute job and it takes time to build consumer trust with your business and brand – it’s certainly not an overnight results type strategy.

Our FIVE Top Tips For Organic Marketing:

1. Be Consistent – you need to be posting content regularly throughout the week, at least five posts/week at minimum.
2. Skip The Sales Talk – talk about your business, products and services like you would to a friend. Share your behind the scenes, get real, be authentic, be relatable and approachable.
3. Plan Ahead – We all think it’s easy to write and publish one post a day, but let’s be honest we’re running a small business and no day ever goes to plan! Put time aside on a weekly or month basis to plan and schedule all your organic marketing. Decide what it is you want to achieve over the next period of time and plan your marketing strategy around that! This will stop you from chasing your tail and feel ‘guilty’ about not posting for three days. Top tip, firstly establish the goal and then write a blog about that. From there the other content will flow easier!
4. Add Value – Give people a reason to want to hear from you, show them that you’re a leader in your industry and you have solutions for their problems. Give little ‘tasters’ of your products or services, provide advice, answer their questions and genuinely always add value.
5. Build A Community – You want your marketing to become a space that like-minded people feel that they can come to and connect with each other, as well as you. Parents, vegans, small business owners, travelers, foodies, etc., whatever your audience is, create a community of like-minded people that connect with you through your marketing platforms.

Paid Marketing

Whenever we start to pay for online traffic, that’s when we move into the paid advertising world! Businesses and brands will run paid marketing campaigns to reach new audiences, increase their brand awareness and achieve quicker results. Through paid advertising, you can directly target, reach and engage with your desired audience, rather than waiting and hoping that they will find you through your organic marketing strategy.
You would say this form of marketing is more sales-forward and focused on driving a specific action; such as liking your page, reading your blog, buying your products, inquiring about your services, or attending an online event. The two most popular forms of paid advertising in the online world, both of which we use for our clients, are Facebook Ads (which will also flow onto several other platforms) and Google Ads.
Paid marketing is less about getting people to know your brand and more about driving a specific action. Therefore, paid advertising campaigns are more direct, straight to the point and have a clear call to action. Your paid advertising will most likely be placed directly in front of someone who is already interested in what you have to offer, whether your Facebook Ad is targeting people who live in Tasmania who are aged 35-50yo who like wine, or a Google Ad targeting people who are searching ‘winery tour Tasmania’. As you can see, it’s far more direct and targeted, which is why it comes at a price!
If you haven’t already noticed… paid advertising does require you to pay for it! So it’s really important to make sure your advertising budget is spent wisely! Rather than an organic post being a flop and it costing you your time, a paid advertising campaign being a flop will cost you $$ and no small business has money to waste on flopped advertising campaigns, right?
The benefit of paid marketing is that you can easily track your conversion rate, return on ad spend (ROAS), or return on investment (ROI). Why’s this important? Because a business might be happy to pay $1 of advertising spend for every bottle of $75 wine they sell, but they probably wouldn’t be too happy if they were paying $20 for every sale of a $75 wine… probably not worth running the ad at all right? By tracking your results, you will know if your ad is generating the desired outcome and making you money or not.

Our FIVE Top Tips For Paid Marketing:

1. Target The Right Audience – It’s important to know who your audience is for a specific paid marketing campaign. By creating the right audience for your campaign, you will see better results. If you just target all people in Tasmania, you’re most likely wasting your money by putting an ad for wine tours in front of 20yo beer drinkers who hate wine… get what we mean?
2. Keep It Simple – If someone is scrolling their social media, you have to convey your message to them quickly, especially if this is their first exposure to your brand. Make it easy for the consumer to know what you are selling and how to buy it, as well as making the conversion process simple & easy.
3. Put Effort Into Design – In this day and age, we have to stand out from the crowd to be noticed! If someone is scrolling their news feed, what’s going to make them stop and look at your ad campaign? Think about your branding, key messages, engaging content, high-quality images and professionally designed imagery.
4. Track Your Results – It’s important to keep an eye on your ad results. Your ad may be targeting 35-50yo but you might notice you’re only converting 35-40yo customers. Or people are clicking through on your ad, but not converting, so what’s stopping them?
5. Make Adjustments & Optimise – Based on your results, you may need to make adjustments to your paid advertising; your audience, wording and images. As well as this, it’s important to optimise your ad for different platforms, you may need to adjust your wording or images based on how it displays on each platform for it to look its best.

Combining Your Organic and Paid Marketing Strategies

As we always say, every business and brand should embrace organic marketing at a bare minimum. Although it may feel quicker and easier to run paid advertising campaigns and you may see immediate results, a paid marketing strategy isn’t a strong long-term strategy and you will forever be relying on paid advertising to drive sales.
If you don’t take advantage of organic marketing, you are limiting your business to the number of ways your audience can connect with you. By developing a strong organic marketing strategy you can create an authentic connection with your customers and audience. By doing this, you will slowly build a marketing tool that’s not only free but gets you results too.
Once your business has a steady and regular organic marketing strategy running, that’s when you might consider adding paid marketing to your strategy. Depending on your marketing and business goals, you may not need to have paid marketing campaigns running all the time. When we work with our clients and discuss their business and marketing goals, we can establish when and where it’s worth running paid marketing campaigns that will help achieve the overall goal, as well as complement their organic marketing strategy.
We realise not every small business has the budget necessary to run paid advertising campaigns, which is why we want to make a point that you can 100% still get amazing results, make money, drive sales, get leads and achieve your business goals through a well thought out and planned organic marketing strategy. In fact, many of our clients don’t run paid marketing campaigns and instead solely focus on their organic strategy. When we feel the time is right or there is an opportunity to get great results from paid marketing, we recommend and work with our clients to make it happen, ensuring they get results and make their money back on every dollar spent for advertising!

Need Help?

So there you have it! Number ONE – ORGANIC MARKETING and then if necessary and when the time is right TWO – PAID ADVERTISING. If you feel like you need a hand getting a grasp on your organic marketing, so you can start seeing some of the results we have mentioned above in your business, we would love to hear from you and chat all things business! Book a complimentary 15min discovery phone call with us to discuss your requirement. Or, perhaps you feel like you’re nailing your organic marketing and you’re ready to start some paid advertising campaigns, but have no idea where to start and you’re worried that you will waste your money? We can help with that too – just book the phone call and we can go from there.
As always, to stay up to date with the hottest online marketing tips for Tasmanian businesses, subscribe for a monthly update on blogs just like this one and remember to follow us on Facebook & Instagram for handy tips through the week, as well as getting to know our team at The Island Creative.