Let’s talk about the difference between organic and paid advertising. What does this mean? Well, just like your smoothie – organic advertising is creating with more “natural” methods while paid advertising utilizes currency (money) to keep the platforms in business that are being utilized for the messaging. Meaning, software companies need to stay in business – they’re run through advertisements and although the traditional perception of paid advertising, is one of hesitance – I do believe that this will become a more frequently seen method of marketing.

What does this mean? Through experimenting with personal branding internally, we’ve quickly realized there’s a huge opportunity for personal advertising – especially in the real estate industry. In an industry where truly our “personal brand” is everything – shouldn’t there be a larger concentration on the quality of the marketing materials we’re presenting that sell our brand?

Do you still have hesitance towards social media? Inside of our industry, the adoption rate of social media has been slow – however, I believe we’re going to start seeing much larger pushes to tap into the large numbers of audience that use social media, mobile devices on a daily (sometimes minute) basis.

Things to understand here is the power of target marketing. Through segmentation and powerful software, your audience (whatever that is) can be easily defined.

Let’s get back to differentiating organic vs. paid advertising –Is paid advertising acceptable for branding yourself? I would begin to argue the answer to that question is yes and here’s why. Targeting. Paid advertising was bad for a while because you would end up with less than ideal lead sources. However, with the significance of data available – I do believe the messaging can be directed to an audience that wants to hear more from you without giving off the impression of “self-selling”.

When it comes to Google, I still am a firm believer of creating organic content – just because their service is designed to give answers and the best answers will always win. However, the abstracts of social media enable the opportunity to grow a following with paid advertisements.

Actionable advice:

1. Optimize your website for Organic SEO
   1. Understand your service lines to the core and create a dedicated web page for each of the individual services.
   2.  Make it easy for visitors to navigate throughout your website by using easy to understand language.
   3. Always keep in mind that you’re developing content for both the end user and the software that it’s being displayed on (in this case google – learn their rules and play them).
2. Start thinking about the development of a personal brand utilizing the power of Ad buys for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
   1. Before marketing a personal brand, you’ll need to create one (which most people haven’t done yet). Messaging is key and we’ve found value from “staying in your lane”.
   2. Facebook and Instagram are connected – This means that target segmentation can be done through one of the platforms and stay consistent on each of the social networks.
   3. Content is king, in that – the more content you have, the better. The more popular “content creators” are publishing on a daily basis, which means that to stay relevant, you’ll need to be in it for the long haul.