Organic marketing is essentially the opposite of paid marketing, in that it doesn’t cost you money.

However, that’s not to say it doesn’t cost anything. Time is valuable, and organic marketing is going to take some of it.

Now, an important distinction you need to understand is that all Organic Marketing is not the same.

I break it down into 3 main types:

- Organic Search Engine Optimization Marketing (SEO)

- Organic Social Media Marketing (SMM)

- Direct Outreach Organic Marketing

All 3 can be effective when done correctly, but SEO and SMM are generally more time consuming and can take much longer to see results…

...which means IF they’re not going to be effective for you, it can take months before you find that out. Ouch.

Not to mention, it can be difficult or impossible to track the results of your effort, sort of like branding. You may get some business, but not know exactly where it came from, so you may continue spending time on channels that aren’t actually producing.

On the other hand, Direct Outreach Organic Marketing, can show results quickly. When you reach out to someone and they respond, it’s usually going to be within a few days.

Since you are literally reaching out to people directly, you know who these people are, and if they become a client, you’ll know it was due to that outreach effort. Meaning you can track the results of your time spent, and even determine KPIs based on your time.

For example, you reached out to 100 people, you converted 3 of them into clients, and it took 9 hours. Your KPIs are a 3% conversion rate per outreach, and 3 hours per client acquisition.

With those as your benchmarks, you can now tweak your efforts and monitor your results quickly. Try doing that with SEO or SMM.

As you might guess, paid marketing is, well, something you pay for.

In theory, paid marketing is great. You can reach the exact audience you want, it doesn’t take much time to keep it going once you’ve got it set up, and you can track the results of every dollar you spend.

And, who doesn’t like the idea of putting in one dollar and getting out two, right?

However, what if your ads aren’t performing? What if the message and offer you’ve carefully crafted, that is supposed to sound like music to your audience’s ears, just isn’t being heard?

Then you’ve got to spend more money and try again. And, then more money if you get it wrong that time, too.

And, soon, you might find yourself in a situation where you’ve spent so much money trying to figure out what message / offer / ad will make your audience excited enough to pull out their wallets that you just can’t keep paying for ads.

So, what do you do then?

And believe me, that’s the typical scenario. It takes trial and error to find the right combination of message, image and audience that will make it rain money.

Not to mention, if you are new to paid ads (Facebook ads in particular), you will NOT know how to scale up. Simply increasing the amount you spend is a guaranteed recipe for failure.

First off, let me ask you… do you have more TIME or MONEY?

If you’ve got plenty of money to spend while you try to figure out who your audience is and what message will make them respond, paid advertising might be an option.

Or, if you’ve already figured out your audience, and are confident they will respond to your marketing message, then go for it.

And in particular, if you’ve got them dialed in and are ready to scale to the moon (and you can handle the influx of new business), paid advertising can be perfect.

On the other hand, if you’ve got more TIME than money, and you aren’t absolutely positive that your audience will salivate when they hear your offer, Direct Outreach Organic Marketing is likely going to be just the ticket.

If you make your offer directly to, let’s say, 20 prospects and none of them bite, simply pay attention to the reason they don’t take you up on it and tweak it to make it more appealing. Then offer it to another 20 and repeat until you get it right.

You’ll dial in your offer more and more until you’ve finally crafted the perfect message & offer that your audience wants to hear, and one that’s strong enough to make them pull out their wallets.

And you’d be surprised how quickly that can happen when you communicate directly with your prospects and get their feedback using direct outreach.

The bottom line is, if you’re relatively new to business, have plenty of time, don’t have much money or don’t know exactly what will excite your audience and make them want what you’ve got to offer, then Direct Outreach Organic Marketing is going to be perfect for you.

And that’s the method I recommend to most people I speak with who are in the early stages of building their business.

On the other hand, if you’ve got money to test with, you’ve got your offer dialed in pretty well so you know your audience wants it, want to scale up and can handle the influx of new business, paid advertising is going to be a good addition to your marketing.