Bob Tripathi shares his opinions, insights and advice on all things digital marketing. In this video, Bob compares paid, earned and organic search to drive traffic and generate leads and which makes sense for your business.

Debbie: Hi this is Deborah Warner here with Bob Tripathi and we know that marketers are looking real hard right now at their forecasts for the coming year and what their best marketing tactics are to use are when it comes to their paid or organic search. What is the right marketing mix, Bob, and what they should do in terms of paid, organic or owned tactics.

Bob: Yeah, it’s a great question because at this time of the year we all are trying to think about how much budget we should allocate in the New Year. What should the mix look like if we’re doing organic or paid? When you really look at all the tactics on the organic side of things you have your organic social media and your SEO at the top of the chart. Then you have your paid side of things which is your Google search, your display ads and Facebook advertising, which we think can get kind of expensive. And the third type is the owned assets like your content marketing.

If you’re on the B2B side you’re looking at ebooks. If you’re in commerce you’re looking at videos. So companies are always trying to balance this out. According to me the best way is to have 30 percent paid tactics. For some companies who want to scale up fast, they might put 60, 70 percent for paid media. You go for the organic for the long term as it takes time to build. But on the paid side of things if you have budget thats the first thing you do is spend money to acquire traffic, leads or sales. So that’s the easy target, so that’s what people go after.

In my suggestion is essentially to pay no more than 30 percent of your leads or your sales through paid acquisition, if you have the budget. For the rest of the 70 percent, you should divide it up between your SEO and your social community and between your content marketing and you have the marketing skills that makes them work harder.

It’s really easy to throw money at a problem to get leads or to get sales or to get traffic. But the tough part is what makes all of us a great marketers and just helps all of us to wake up every morning and just get into it and learn new things fail and then try it again. So my suggestion to marketers is yes, paid is great. It’s going to give you the scale to do a lot more marketing so you can generate a lot more leads and it’s easier to scale fast, but organic and the owned side like content marketing is where it’s at.

Debbie: OK. Awesome. So quality content marketing. There you have it. This is Deborah Warner and Bob Tripathi. If you have any questions you can contact us at bobtripathi.com. Thank you. Thank you.