Organic Leads vs Paid Leads: The Great Leads Debate
When it comes to lead generation, there are two main types of leads: organic leads vs paid leads. Which should you use? That depends on your business and marketing goals.
Organic leads are those that you generate through your own efforts, such as website traffic, SEO, or social media outreach.
Paid leads, on the other hand, are generated through paid advertising campaigns, such as Google AdWords, YouTube Ads, Solo Ads or Facebook Ads.
Which one is better?
Organic leads can be cheaper and more effective in the long run, but paid leads can be more immediate and result in higher conversion rates faster.
Why Choose Organic Leads?
When it comes to lead generation, organic leads are the best way to go long term. Why?
Here are some of our reasons:
- Organic leads are more likely to convert than other types of leads.
- They are less expensive to acquire than other types of leads.
- Are more likely to be quality leads.
- Organic leads are more likely to buy your product or service.
- Provide a better return on investment than other types of leads.
- Have a longer lifespan than other types of leads.
- Are easier to qualify than other types of leads.
- More likely to result in a sale than other types of leads.
- Organic leads are more likely to be interested in your product or service than other types of leads.
- Are more likely to close than other types of leads.
When it comes to lead generation, organic leads are golden! But just do not expect organic leads to come flooding in, as producing organic leads takes time, and well thought out marketing strategies.
If you need any help learning about organic leads, our course offers everything you need to get started – right here.
Why Choose Paid Leads?
Paid leads are leads that you can get in a variety of ways including:
- Purchasing leads directly from a lead generation company, like Traffic Authority.
- Run ads yourself to generate leads using – PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns like with, Google Adwords, Solo Ads or Facebook Ads.
Lead generation companies can get their leads from a variety of sources, including organically, a network of websites, and even direct mail.
Ever heard of Angie’s List?
They are actually a lead gen company in the home services and building projects niches. They sell leads to businesses in these markets.
In the case of Google or Facebook ads, they generate traffic from people using their platforms. Entrepreneurs, affiliate marketers and businesses run their own ads on these platforms and pay by the click (Visitor) generated, in hopes to turn these clicks (people) into their own leads.
Solo ad sellers on the other hand maybe using all the methods described above to build their own list of leads, which they then turn around and sell email clicks to other marketers for profit.
We have used all of these methods above to get leads for our own business, and have done so successfully for many years now.
Here are the advantages to using paid leads:
- You can get started quickly. If you need to start generating leads immediately, paid leads can be a great option.
- They’re usually more qualified. Paid leads are often more qualified than organic leads, because people who sign up for paid lead lists have already shown an interest in what you’re selling.
- It’s easier to target your audience. With paid leads, you can target your audience by location, demographics, and even interests.
- Easier and faster to scale. Once you know your metrics.
However, there are a few drawbacks to using paid leads.
They can be expensive. Paid leads can be more expensive than organic leads, so it’s important to do your research and compare prices before you buy.
They may not be as interested in your product or service. Paid leads may not be as interested in your product or service as organic leads, so you may end up wasting some of your money dialing in an ad campaign or offer.
It can be difficult to gauge the effectiveness of paid leads, so it’s important to track all of your paid ad campaigns to make sure you’re getting good results.
Especially if you have more than one ad campaign running at the same time from different sources.
Overall, paid leads can be the best way to generate leads quickly and easily.
Bare in mind that it’s important to weigh the pros and cons before you decide whether or not to use them.
What Are Organic Inbound Leads?
Organic inbound leads are those that come from people who have found your business through organic search results, as opposed to paid or other types of advertising.
The main benefit of organic inbound leads is that they are highly qualified, as people only click on organic search results if they are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
This means that you can be sure that the leads you get from organic search are likely to convert into customers.
Additionally, organic inbound leads cost nothing extra, so they can be a more cost-effective way to generate leads than paid advertising.
If you want to attract organic inbound leads, it’s important to make sure your website is well optimized for search engines.
You should also produce high-quality content that will attract people who are looking for information about your products or services.
If you’re looking for a more cost-effective way to generate leads, organic inbound leads could be the answer.
Should I Use Both Organic and Paid Leads?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the mix of organic and paid leads will vary depending on your business and its goals.
However, it is generally recommended to mix organic and paid leads in order to achieve the best results.
Both organic and paid leads can be valuable for your business, but it’s important to remember that each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
It’s important to test different combinations of organic and paid leads to see what works best for your business.
We use both to generate our leads, depending on the type of affiliate product or service we are offering.
Best Ways To Generate Organic Leads
Here are some of the best strategies to bring in more organic leads:
- Content Marketing: Create high-quality, valuable content such as blog posts, articles, eBooks and infographics that provide value or solve problems for your target audience.
- SEO Optimization: Improve your website’s search engine ranking through strategic keyword use, backlinking, and on-page SEO tactics.
- Social Media Engagement: Regularly engage with your audience by sharing relevant content, responding to comments, and using social proof.
- Email Marketing: Build an email list through content offers and engage your subscribers with regular, personalized newsletters.
- Guest Posting: Write guest posts on reputable websites within your niche to tap into their audience.
- Webinars and Free Training: Offer educational webinars that provide value while showcasing your expertise.
- Online Communities: Participate in online forums or social media groups relevant to your industry to build relationships and share your expertise.
- Video Marketing: Create both long form and short form videos, and upload them to video platforms and other social media such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. Video marketing can generate a ton of organic leads for your business. Billions of hours of video are watched everyday. People now watch more videos online, then conventional TV programming.
These strategies build trust and credibility fast, helping you attract leads naturally.
Best Ways To Generate Paid Leads
Generating leads through paid advertising is an effective and scalable way to grow your business.
Here are some top methods:
- Google Ads: Target specific search terms to reach customers actively searching for products or services like yours.
- Facebook Ads: Use precise audience targeting based on demographics, interests, and behaviors to attract relevant leads.
- Instagram Ads: Visual storytelling and sponsored posts help capture attention and drive traffic.
- Solo Ads: Rent another marketer’s email list to promote your offer to a targeted audience, driving quick traffic and leads with Solo Ads.
- LinkedIn Ads: Ideal for B2B marketing, LinkedIn allows you to target professionals based on job title, industry, or company size.
- YouTube Ads: Engage potential customers through video content, building awareness while driving conversions.
By leveraging these platforms, you can quickly reach new audiences, collect high-quality leads, and scale your sales.
Settling The Organic Leads VS Paid Leads Debate
Both paid leads and organic leads are great for building a business. However, the main difference between which of the two you should choose, is that usually running paid ads is historically much quicker for generating customers.
It’s recommended that you develop both an organic lead and a paid lead strategy – which will help you develop a complete marketing plan to attract in quality leads & customers.
So… Let’s put the organic leads vs paid leads idea to rest, they’re both great. Whether they are paid for, or whether they’re free….
The other big difference is content marketing can produce organic leads for years, which with paid marketing, when you stop paying, you stop getting leads.
Content marketing negative side is that it takes a lot of TIME to produce content that remains effective. Getting Paid leads you can scale must faster.
Your Business Growth Depends On Your Lead Quality
Remember that whichever form of lead generation marketing you choose to use, lead quality is the most important metric to be measuring.
Whether you’re producing high quality digital marketing content or using digital marketing paid advertising – focus on the messaging used to attract more leads. This messaging will help you either increase or decrease lead quality.
When compared to paid leads, or compared to organic leads, lead quality is generally the same.
Organic marketing should generate similar conversions as most paid lead generation.
For more information and advice on organic leads, or paid ads, be sure to check out our eMoneyPeeps blog, because we have lots of helpful articles on email marketing and other marketing topics.
Please leave us a comment below if you ever have any questions or need help in anyway, or just say hi.
Have a fantastic day!
Sincerely,
Your Friends And Partners
Richard And John Weberg
Thanks for this great article.
Organic leads i.e. Leads from organic search are the best, however, from my own opinion, they are difficult to acquire because you need to put your time, funds and energy to get a stable organic lead unlike that of paid leads whereby you don’t need to concern yourself about any search engine algorithm update. Don’t get me wrong, Paid leads are more expensive than organic leads though. My point is organic leads are difficult to acquire.
Hey thanks for your thoughts on this article my friend. You are very correct, as paid leads are faster and much easier to acquire. Getting leads through building organic traffic is a much longer game, and one does need to be constantly tweaking their organic lead gen strategy to stay in the top results. Buying traffic to generate leads although does have an upfront cost, can equal a much more consistent immediate lead flow, and when one is optimizing their sales funnel process can lead to very nice ROI (return on investment).
All marketing strategies to generate leads will have some cost of both time and money, even when using a strategy to get organic leads.
This article here – How to Get Free Website Traffic, is there really such a thing? Explains in more detail, why no traffic and lead gen strategy is really free. It is wise for marketers and businesses to do both if they want consistent long term profits.