Paid vs. Free Promotion Opportunities
Posted 27th January 2015 at 09:47 PM by Backlinksboy
Tags display ads, free traffic, pay-per-click, ppc
Long has the debate raged about which is the better use of internet-marketing budget: paid-search initiatives or organic methods to gain new customers. PPC people generally feel the tools at their disposal are faster, more measurable, and therefore superior to organic, while SEO types insist that their techniques have more staying power and are more “honest” in the end. The truth is that there’s a place for each in any comprehensive marketing strategy and we’ll now explore some developments concerning each.
Paid Promotion Opportunities:
Paid promotion opportunities are exactly paid ads. These include PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Display Ads, Retargeting campaigns, Sponsored Content and others. Using Google Adwords, Bing Ads and other platforms you can create text, image, or video ads and have them appear when someone searches for the keywords in Googleand when people visit display network partner sites. While we’d all like to believe the stories told to us by search engines and some so-called SEO gurus, that “just build a great site and the customers will come”, we know it’s just not true. As your business slowly (and painfully) makes the ascent through the ranks you’ll need revenue in the meantime to meet obligations. Enter paid initiatives – they’re very difficult to avoid altogether, unless you have a bottomless budget.
Paid advertising isn’t limited to the big search engines – social media channels are offering an increasing amount of ad products (you didn’t think they’d be free forever, did you?) In fact, Facebook has now made it just about impossible to grow your audience organically on its platform. However, Facebook offers some of the best audience targeting of any social ads, and includes Facebook Xchange, its own remarketing ad product, so there’s no reason to abandon the channel – just ante up instead.
Sponsored Content including paid video publishing platforms offer another opportunity to get in front of potentially millions of people (impressions, anyway) and drive a serious amount of traffic to your site. Now, how that traffic behaves once it gets there will vary wildly from site to site but if you’re in need of brand awareness in particular this might be worth adding to your marketing tactics.
The barriers to entry with paid-search are still pretty low. You can start advertising with a relatively small budget, but obviously better-funded campaigns inevitably perform better.
Free Promotional Methods:
The most favoured marketing tactic is using free promotional methods and trying to get the website found naturally. Social media has generally aided this effort while SEO has become increasingly difficult and requiring of more patience. Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest help you find audiences without having to pay (though Twitter and YouTube both offer pretty robust advertising options). There are other free social engagement tactics which provide results suchas promoting your infographic on Imgur (pronounced imager), and loading up a presentation on Slideshare or a similar Web 2.0 domain. When adding images in Imgur its large user base ensures that many people will see them and you can build some traffic and brand recognition. Slideshare is great for providing engaging information about your business in the form of slides with a link back to your business or brand, and they generally tend to rank highly in the SERPs.
Both paid and free promotional methods work well and one could argue that no campaign is complete without a mix of both. Each requires time and effort and even “free” ones may just mean you have to hire an agency to run it for you (not so free). Paid methods are often easy to start but difficult to truly master. What initiatives are actively pursued by your company?
Paid Promotion Opportunities:
Paid promotion opportunities are exactly paid ads. These include PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Display Ads, Retargeting campaigns, Sponsored Content and others. Using Google Adwords, Bing Ads and other platforms you can create text, image, or video ads and have them appear when someone searches for the keywords in Googleand when people visit display network partner sites. While we’d all like to believe the stories told to us by search engines and some so-called SEO gurus, that “just build a great site and the customers will come”, we know it’s just not true. As your business slowly (and painfully) makes the ascent through the ranks you’ll need revenue in the meantime to meet obligations. Enter paid initiatives – they’re very difficult to avoid altogether, unless you have a bottomless budget.
Paid advertising isn’t limited to the big search engines – social media channels are offering an increasing amount of ad products (you didn’t think they’d be free forever, did you?) In fact, Facebook has now made it just about impossible to grow your audience organically on its platform. However, Facebook offers some of the best audience targeting of any social ads, and includes Facebook Xchange, its own remarketing ad product, so there’s no reason to abandon the channel – just ante up instead.
Sponsored Content including paid video publishing platforms offer another opportunity to get in front of potentially millions of people (impressions, anyway) and drive a serious amount of traffic to your site. Now, how that traffic behaves once it gets there will vary wildly from site to site but if you’re in need of brand awareness in particular this might be worth adding to your marketing tactics.
The barriers to entry with paid-search are still pretty low. You can start advertising with a relatively small budget, but obviously better-funded campaigns inevitably perform better.
Free Promotional Methods:
The most favoured marketing tactic is using free promotional methods and trying to get the website found naturally. Social media has generally aided this effort while SEO has become increasingly difficult and requiring of more patience. Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest help you find audiences without having to pay (though Twitter and YouTube both offer pretty robust advertising options). There are other free social engagement tactics which provide results suchas promoting your infographic on Imgur (pronounced imager), and loading up a presentation on Slideshare or a similar Web 2.0 domain. When adding images in Imgur its large user base ensures that many people will see them and you can build some traffic and brand recognition. Slideshare is great for providing engaging information about your business in the form of slides with a link back to your business or brand, and they generally tend to rank highly in the SERPs.
Both paid and free promotional methods work well and one could argue that no campaign is complete without a mix of both. Each requires time and effort and even “free” ones may just mean you have to hire an agency to run it for you (not so free). Paid methods are often easy to start but difficult to truly master. What initiatives are actively pursued by your company?
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