Paid vs. Organic Content: Your Best Industrial Marketing Strategy

More and more manufacturing companies are looking for an industrial marketing strategy that can help them stand out from the competition. One of the easiest ways to do this is by creating an online presence with both paid and organic content (free).

If you’re thinking of running paid ads, you should really consider running them alongside organic content. That’s how you can get the most value out of your spend on advertising. There has to be a balance between the two for a higher chance to see a return on investment.

Strategic paid advertising leverages both paid and organic traffic to earn more views and gather more leads. Some clients have more robust marketing teams for this but others don’t, so we make sure to start by meeting everyone where they’re at. Before you start, the first thing you need is a clear idea of the difference between paid and organic content.

Paid vs. Organic

Industrial Marketing with Paid Ads

Paid ads refer to any content that is boosted or displayed to an audience in exchange for money. It will allow you to reach people who aren’t actively searching for your products or services. This includes Google ads, SEM, retargeting, display—on any platform. You can get a good return on investment from your paid ads but other times, you won’t. This is why you can’t just run ads however you like. You need to be mindful of how you spend, too.

Paid ads include several online tools from Google ads, such as search ads, call-only ads, and display ads on YouTube, LinkedIn, and other forms of advertising that run on other social media platforms.

Industrial Marketing with Organic Content

Then you have the “free” stuff. Organic content involves looking at on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Good SEO takes time and expertise, and it’s also poorly understood by most industrial companies but in today’s digital world. It’s a great way to make your website discoverable on search engines.

Organic content can be thought of as a way to “inoculate” your website against future search engine penalties. With organic content, you don’t have to pay for traffic, clicks, or conversions. Here, you can gain traffic to your website by simply putting out good quality content that your audience would be interested in.

No one tool always works best. That’s why it’s important to fully consider your options and evaluate which marketing approach is best suited for your company’s goals.

Get Expert Help

Here at MFG Tribe, our industrial marketing agency works with clients daily to figure out the best industrial marketing strategies for our clients. There’s so much to consider and it really comes down to your short-term and long-term goals.

Before you get on that discovery call, here’s what we suggest:

Use Google Ads

The most popular advertising platform for industrial companies is Google Ads. Marketers use Google Ads to put a company’s content at the top of the search engine results page.

You can do this for your industrial company, as well, while your organic content is consistently tweaked to rank at the top through SEO.

Do SEM alongside SEO efforts as most of the time, people can recognize ads on the SERP and they are less likely to click on results that are obviously ads.

The number one risk in running SEM campaigns on Google Ads is that you’ll never know the intent behind the search and so the quality of traffic is never guaranteed. The searchers of your paid keywords might be looking for the solutions that your industrial company offers but they can also be doing competitive research or data scraping to sell you something instead of the other way around.

If your ads are getting an 80% to 90% bounce rate then your content is not interesting enough for your target audience so take it as a clue to optimize your content. Moreover, not knowing the intent behind the query can also affect the performance of your campaigns.

As for organic content, convince Google that you are a subject matter expert so you can climb in the search rankings. Many of our clients end up ranking first for their content. Organic content takes longer but has more lasting results.

Use LinkedIn for Better Targeting

LinkedIn is the only social platform that will work for industrial companies. It’s the only platform wherein you can strategically target companies and people with certain job functions. You can build a list of relevant people and show your display ads only to them.

If you are going the PPC route, you need to make sure that every click is a good click. You want to target people that have the highest chance of actually becoming customers.

You can strategically target people and opt to only show your ad to relevant audiences. On average, you can be charged up to around $2 to $15 per click. And remember that the higher the job title, such as CEOs and managers, the more expensive it will be.

On the other hand, there aren’t many applications of industrial marketing on YouTube. While display ads on YouTube can be used to build awareness and drive traffic to your website, for the most part, it’s not going to be very effective.

Hence, for industrial companies, we don’t advise using Facebook or Twitter for PPC campaigns.

Spend Wisely

Sometimes marketers go way beyond their budget without noticing. For mid-sized industrial companies, you should usually be capping your spend from $1,000 to $2,000 a month. Anything over that is likely too much and therefore becomes a waste of money rather than an investment. And that overspend can be allotted for other industrial marketing tactics.

One tactic that you can try is retargeting. This focuses on people who have already shown an interest in your products or services and they typically have a higher chance of converting into paying customers. You can set a budget of $100 a month for this as a start.

But more importantly, you should monitor your spending in real-time so you can also track your ROI before it’s too late. And as an additional word of caution, the benefit of using paid ads tends to plateau at a certain point, which is why it’s important to have a strategic industrial marketing plan in place.

Final Thoughts

Understand that just because you’re putting in money on something doesn’t mean that you’ll get your money back in an instant. Like any other investment, results are not guaranteed, but the chances of increasing your returns depend on how strategic you are with your advertising and your organic content marketing strategy. As a general rule of thumb: know what works, stop what doesn’t, and improve what could be done better.

To make sure you’re getting the most out of your industrial marketing strategy, you can always get the help of an industrial marketing agency with expertise in your industry. If you want the best industrial marketing agency, give MFG Tribe a try. Visit our website to learn more now!