With increased competition, organizations are competing to attract the attention of the buyers. It is not enough any more to rely upon organic engagement with our buyers on the internet.

But we need to also consider paid digital marketing through search engines, email, social media, or mobile devices. Organizations also need to use paid digital marketing to direct traffic to their site from other sites using search engine optimization, especially targeting emails, the right kind of affiliation relationships, and social media optimization. It is important to understand how advertising works because we don’t want to waste the hard-earned dollars on digital marketing, because we need to save time and cost by avoiding the most common mistakes that can be done on digital marketing.
Organic engagement: is interaction with your prospects stimulated by the quality of your content

Paid engement: is interaction with your prospects stimulated by the payment for advertising of your content. For example: paying for adverts, affiliate marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC) on search engines or social media platforms
Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK
At the Candidate, we use very little paid-for channels within our digital marketing campaigns. We prefer to focus on content and search engine optimization, which we see a lot of results from.
Paid engagement is not for everyone

The Canaidate Ltd focuses on Organic engagement – “owned” high quality content for the website and social media presence as well as encouragement of public relations (PR) and “earned” industry recognition as well as trust from clients and candidates
So therefore, we are appearing in well optimized positions for a range of keywords across search engines and social channels, and therefore we don’t spend a lot in terms of paid-for positions within search engines or within the social media channels.
The only piece of paid-for activity that we do online is paying for job advertisements. There are a range of employments websites where you can buy positions in terms of monthly contracts with unlimited jobs posts or a cost for individual job posts that you make on those particular websites.
Vertical markets are focused on a specific industry. E.g.digital marketing job boards in the UK

Horizontal markets apply to different industries. E.g. job boards offering jobs in any industry in the world
These are not cost-per-click models and therefore a response isn’t guaranteed but it is very important, in fact crucial for our business, to appear within these paid-for job, advertisement websites.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece
Paid channels are one part of search with PPC campaigns. A lot of social networks like Facebook, like LinkedIn, Twitter advertising right now and Instagram in a few months, and the same like search is on display right now let’s say with banner campaigns where you are on a website, clicking on an image or a Flash banner and going to the website of the advertiser so again this is a paid campaign.
When planning paid advertising you can focus on:

– Searchers of a specific keyword phrase on a particular search engine

– Users of a particular social network

– Individuals in a certain location
– etc.