If you’re an online business owner, chances are that you understand that content marketing is a great marketing tactic for growing your online brand.

This is because, apart from helping you to get leads for your business, it’s also an amazing sales generation machine.

Due to this, a lot of B2B and B2C brands invest heavily in content marketing, and also getting awesome results in the process.

A recent survey by the Content Marketing Institute reveals that 91% of B2B companies use content marketing as a strategy.

This shows how content marketing is a popular trend among B2B marketers.

In another survey of B2C marketers, the Content Marketing Institute found that 86% of them use content marketing as a marketing strategy.

percentage of b2c respondents who use content marketing
Source: Content Marketing Institute

From the above, you can see that content marketing is a proven strategy that works for B2B and B2C companies.

While some businesses prefer to focus on organic traffic when implementing this strategy, others prefer to use paid traffic alone to boost their results.

In this post, I want to show you why you need both organic and paid traffic to succeed with content marketing, and the steps you can take to get it right.

Let’s dive in.

Organic and Paid Traffic Combination: Why You Should Use Both For Content Marketing to Work

To get amazing short-term and long-term results from content marketing, a combination of organic and paid traffic will help you greatly.

This is because, although organic traffic helps you get more leads for your business on autopilot, in the long run, it takes time to materialize. Paid traffic, on the other hand, gets you immediate results if done properly.

Before making any purchase, 65% of customers click on Ads, according to research by Clever Clicks.

This shows that by using paid traffic, you stand a better chance of converting more leads.

With organic traffic, you become a trusted source of information in your industry. Not only that, you can generate more leads for your business through it.

According to research by Impact, small businesses that use a blog to generate organic traffic get 126% more business leads compared to those who don’t use a blog.

Using blogging alone, you can get more organic traffic, which will also lead to getting more businesses to work with.

Hence, if you use both paid and organic traffic strategies for your content marketing, you’ll potentially get more results than someone who doesn’t.

How to Use a Mix Of Paid and Organic Traffic to Fuel Your Content Marketing Efforts to Success

From the above, you can see that using a mix of paid and organic traffic is a surefire strategy to get more success from content marketing

If you’re wondering how to go about it, here are some steps you can follow.

Step #1: Create Content that Solves Your Audience’s Pain Points

To effectively use paid and organic traffic to get awesome results from content marketing, you need to create content that solves your audience’s pain points.

When your content helps your audience to solve any problems they’re facing, they’re more likely to come back to you and also make a purchase in the long run.

With a problem-solving approach to content marketing, you’re more likely to rank high on the search engines.

Not only that, the leads which you get from both paid and organic traffic stand a better chance of converting into paying customers.

This is because, when people see you as someone who’s genuinely interested in solving their problems, they’re more likely to know and like you.

To create content that solves your audience’s pain points, you should take your time to research what exactly is going on in their minds, whenever they search for anything on Google.

Also, you should have an onboarding guide that shows your employees exactly how you want them to approach each content they create for your company.

Step #2: Use Relevant SEO Keywords in Your Paid Traffic Campaigns

Whenever you want to create paid traffic campaigns as an offshoot of your SEO efforts, then you should always put yourself in the shoes of your potential audience.

Ask yourself, if there are relevant keywords that your audience is actively searching for that you can use in your ads.

When you do, you stand a chance of getting more targeted results from paid traffic.

This is because using relevant keywords in your paid ads, help you appear in relevant searches by your target audience.

Keyword research tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, and so on, will help you greatly in this regard.

Step #3: Optimize Your Ads Landing Pages For Search Engines

When it comes to paid traffic, your landing page matters a lot. Since you want anyone who comes across your ads to take a specific action, using a landing page is the best way to go about it.

However, what happens to your landing page once your ads campaign is over.

While most people don’t optimize these pages for search engines, doing so actually helps you to rank high for target keywords and boost your position in search engine rankings.

That way, you can get organic clicks from your landing pages even if you’re not running any paid traffic to it.

If the landing page is for a time-sensitive event or to target a very specific audience, then using this strategy might not be the best for you.

Step #4: Review Your Click-Through Rates (CTR) From Paid Traffic For Future Content Purpose

Since paid ads help you to get short-term results, reviewing its performance will help you know exactly what your audience is interested in.

So, after running paid ad campaigns, you should take time to review your CTR.

When you discover the ads that perform really well, it shows that if you can create content on your blog and optimize it around those keywords, it’s most likely to convert really well.

For the ones that don’t perform as expected, you might as well not create any content related to those keywords in the future.

Conclusion 

Paid and organic traffic are different strategies that fuel your content marketing efforts to success.

While some business owners treat them as two competing forces for their marketing attention and budget, seeing them as complementary to one another is the best way to go about it.

Although paid traffic doesn’t have any direct impact on organic traffic, when used together, you stand a better chance of improving your organic campaigns in the long run.

While organic traffic is more dependable and affordable, it takes time to see results from it. Paid traffic on the other hand, will put your name out there and help you to build brand awareness faster.