Local Business Marketing, Since Ai - Organic or Paid?

Well, I have a question today, organic or paid, when it comes to advertising or marketing your business, and which one is best for your company? Which one works the best for you? And today that's what I want to talk about. Hi, my name is Jeff Harrison with Swing Point Media and we are a digital marketing agency helping local businesses get more customers and keep them by nurturing them. Today I want to talk about a couple of terms that sometimes you might hear. One may be called organic and the other is paid. By the way, this is a live show. If you have questions, please put them in the comments and I will answer your questions specifically. So let's get back to this. What are those terms, organic and paid and what do they mean? And what I want you to think about is first of all, organic means it is attracting new customers without being paid for. And we see this all the time. We see it in places like, let's say on Google Search. If you search for something and those returns come up, they're called search engine results that come back. You'll see these and if they don't have a little word said, sponsored or ads beside them, these are organic results. And these are usually in the forms of articles that have been written and posted on a website that answers that question that that person may be searching for at the time in that comes up. It tends to have some features which I won't go into today because I want to keep it very short and very specific. But as certain features that allows that to show up on the top of Google Research or Google results, these come in without any paid advertising, which is the next thing. And before I go to that, I want you to think about organic in this way. If you decided you wanted to have a fruit tree, you wanted to have oranges, what you would do is you would plant an orange tree in your yard and you would nurture it and eventually it would start producing fruit. The cool thing about organic is once it starts producing fruit, it will produce fruit indefinitely as long as it is in the ground, right? Well, this is the cool thing. You never have to go to the grocery store to get more oranges because the fruit, it keeps coming up on your, your, your tree. Well, the same thing happens with your content. A blog post example, and I'll give you a specific example. One of our clients back in March of, I think it was 2019, we wrote an article for them and we wrote a lot of articles since then. But this one stood out because from that time till today, it produces about 1700 organic visitors to their Website every month. Now, to put that in context, the average local business, and you can look this up, I challenge you to look it up on Google. The average number of monthly visitors a local business will get is somewhere between three and 400. So just this one article gets three to four times more that it never, they never had to pay to have the traffic come to that website or find that article. It is in the top of search results. Now, they have many of those. But this is the, this is the, the process we did. We started building organic traffic for that client. So this is one of those things. Organic means you're not paying for it after it's been created. Yes, you're probably going to pay for that if it's a video or it's a written piece of content. But, but after that it just keeps on working. It's like having that, you know, it's like, it's like having a machine that you put in place that just keeps on working. Now the other part is called paid advertising. And I want you to think of this as it's like having a sink or the control at your kitchen sink. If you want water, what do you do? You turn the valve on and what comes out water, which is your desired result. Think of water as traffic. It is giving you the results you're looking for. That dial, if you will, is the fee you pay to that platform for that traffic source. So let's take that article as an example. What if we took that same article or video and we put it out on the Internet, but then we paid to have traffic, specific traffic sent to that. As long as we have the spigot or the valve turned on, what keeps happening? Traffic keeps coming to that article. And as the moment you turn that valve off, what happens? It stops. So the big difference between organic and paid is one continues to work while the other is on demand. And you have the opportunity to turn it on or turn it off. Now, neither are bad. One is not better than the other. It comes down to what does your company need, what does your local business need to make it work? Well, here at Swingpoint Media, we do both things. But ideally what we do is we build organic traffic because it's one of those things. If we do our homework and we find out exactly, you know, the problems your ideal customers need solving and we create content that helps solve those problems. These are like breadcrumbs. It leads the traffic to you and you never have to pay for it or do it again. We kind of like that. But there are times where we have to do what we call paid advertising, and that helps boost that. So for you, as a local business, you have to decide, hey, do I have a business that I can wait for this traffic to come? Because organic traffic takes a little longer? I would say in most cases, depending on your frequency, it could take somewhere between four to six months, maybe even nine months to start seeing a really good return on that investment. And I say that whether you put out one post a month, one post a week, or three or four posts a month, each one will do a little different job. It's almost like as if you hired people to dig your. Dig a pool in your yard and you hired one person with one shovel, it would take a long time for that pool to be dug out. But if you do. If you. If you had 10 people with shovels, of course it would happen 10 times faster or in one tenth of the time. So as you're looking at this, you have to decide, do I need business right now, or can I do. I have a business that is working really well, but I just want more business in the future. If you need business right now, I would highly suggest you take a look at paid advertising. Because you're like somebody who is thirsty. You need to turn the water on and get a result right away. By the way, somebody asked me the other day, is there anything. Is there. Is there anything such as bad traffic? Jeff? And I said, no, I said, there's bad, not bad traffic. All traffic is good. But what you may get is you may get the type of traffic that is not ideal for you. As an example, if you are somebody who has a business and you do a specific thing, but you try to attract people in generality, I'll give you an example. Well, my business.

I help homeowners that live in the Coachella Valley. Now, I want you to think about that. If you know the Coachella Valley, there's about a half a million people living here, you know, throughout the year, full time. And probably not all of those people are your ideal customer. But if you pay for advertising, that's all the direction you give it, then what'll happen is it'll turn that spigot on. And anybody who owns a home in the Coachella Valley possibly will see that ad. The people that are most ideal and not ideal. But maybe you're looking for people who need a certain thing and you get more specific. Well, they have. They have children in grade school. They. They own their automobiles, they travel this way that maybe they. Maybe they like to camp out in Other words, you're starting to nail that down. And now what happens is that traffic that it puts your ad in front of are more likely to resonate with your ad. So today I want to talk about first of all, what is organic and what is paid. What is best for your business. Based on your, I'm going to call it business life cycle, one may be better than the other. Now often, even though we're building organic traffic for customers, they may come back and say, hey, we have a special going on and we want to advertise this in those situations where we run paid ads, absolutely. It helps them because it triggers that activity. One of our customers who just started a new, a new line that they offer, we are now pushing more for that new line to kind of kickstart it. We're doing that with paid advertising. Now simultaneously, we're also writing articles that are organic which will continue to build traffic over. Now we first started, I want to talk about a third type that this is where it really gets fun. Let me go back to that example where I said over 1700 people every month come because of the one article. Well, let's say you had five articles on your website and let's say on an average they get a thousand. On average they get a thousand visitors coming to a website every month. Well, that traffic actually is better because it's already, if you will, they've already raised their hand and said, hey, I'm interested in this. I'm going to click on this link that takes me to an article that gives me an answer for that. Well, the type of people going there probably have a higher intent of making a decision or moving to the next level of making a decision. They're probably more likely to go to that article. Well, here's the cool thing. All that traffic comes to your website. Who owns that? No, it's not the search engines, it's not Google. They're on your website right now. That is something you own. Well, what I would recommend, and this is what we do for our customers is then we'll put an ad that's specific to those type of people who come to that article. We'll put an ad on that actual article. We've all seen it. Sometimes they're a pop up ad, sometimes they're a banner ad, sometimes they're just written information that is set apart within that article. By doing this, you actually now have turned your website into, into your own Google search or Facebook or YouTube, whatever you want to call it and you're attracting for no charge. People coming to a website who have a desire to solve a specific problem that you and your business handle. It's almost like this. One of our customers is a solar company. Well, hey, once I put the solar on my roof, all that energy that comes from the sun, I no longer have to pay for. Well, the same thing with organic marketing. Once you get that traffic coming to your website and we know specifically they're asking questions that your articles solve, you can now put a solution that your services offer on that article. So I hope this has made sense today. This is all I want to talk about. Hey, what is organic? What is paid? Why would I use it? When should I use it? And then that third one, I'll call it a hybrid model, where now you are your own Facebook. My name is Jeff Harrison. If you'd like more information, you have questions, please put them in the comments. We're coming live to you from the Coachella Valley. That's down in Southern California in the Palm Springs area, where, hey, about nine months out of the year, it's wonderful. About the other three months, it's a little hot. But, hey, that's why we have pools. Have a great day, and we'll see you again next time. Thank you.