The Pros & Cons of Paid Advertising

As an artist, it is important to have good web visibility if you want to be able to develop your own following and fan base. In order to do so, it is important to understand the difference between paid and organic advertising.
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We will walk you through the differences between paid and organic advertisements,  along with their pros and cons.

Organic Advertising 

Organic advertising helps you naturally promote yourself as an artist, without paying anything. It uses a combination of tools and personal effort to build brand awareness, increase visibility and generate traffic to your website. Choosing organic advertising might mean that you take more time to build up your virtual presence on the internet, however, this is a great option if you do not have a budget to constantly afford paid advertisements.  

Choosing the option of organic ads allows you to track how your campaign is going and modify the target anytime you think is necessary. However, it is important to understand in advance which audience you are targeting in your campaign, which helps determine the content you post. It is important to experiment with different types of content to see what your audience responds to. Awareness is fundamental in order to keep up with research about the latest trends and demands in the industry relevant to you. 

Organic advertising performs better in the long term but requires more effort and time to see results.

Paid Advertisements

Paid advertising is not free. This type of method pushes your business up in a short time. If you choose this option, you probably have the budget to create a marketing campaign to promote in a short time and aim to achieve great numbers.

One of the perks to choosing paid advertising is that it allows you to amend the target anytime and to target your campaign to a specific audience because it helps to target the most receptive people to your service or product and try to produce more sales. While this type of advertising reaches a vast audience in a short time, the most important question to ask yourself is whether this marketing method is beneficial to you.

The cons of paid advertising are that while you can produce one of the best ads that reach the maximum engagement and clicks, as soon as you reached your budget,  you risk losing engagement, visibility and impressions. Paid advertisements can become very costly as you need to constantly invest in them to actively maintain engagement. 

Pay-per-click (PPC) is one option for paid advertisement. It is the advertising option where you are charged by publishers for each click on your ad. The tricky part is that even if your ads are not making any revenue, you would be charged anyway for the click, not the purchase.

Another con to consider when investing in paid advertising is that you are not the only business or artist that wishes to be on the top of Google search results. What if your competitors have already chosen the same or similar keywords as you and have a higher budget? Your business is going to have a lower ranking in the search engines and your competitors will be more visible!

Most consumers are now aware of the sponsored links through paid advertisements which show up as the top results on the search engine, which means often they simply ignore the paid ones. Then most of the consumers move forward to the next  link listed below on the search engine which are recorded companies with great value and are there for their worth and effort of the use of organic ads.

There are many valuable resources out there that you can also check out on Forbes on how to build your digital footprint or on LinkedIn for some extra tips about organic and paid search. If you want to learn more about paid advertising, schedule a free consultation with us today! 

ANNA AMATI

Writer
The Modern Artist Project