Balancing Your Paid + Organic Marketing CAC

Growth compounds when paid and organic are designed as one system.

Most teams manage paid and organic separately. Different owners. Different metrics. Different incentives.

Column 13 approaches paid and organic as a single acquisition system, measured through customer economics rather than channel performance. The objective isn’t to favor one channel over the other—it’s to reduce blended Customer Acquisition Cost (bCAC) while maintaining steady, reliable demand.

Why Do Paid + Organic Rarely Support Each Other?

Very few teams have the ability—or the mandate—to influence both paid and organic performance at the same time. Even fewer have access to downstream sales and revenue data that shows what acquisition actually costs once deals close, repeat, or expand.

As a result:

  • Paid channels are abandoned when CAC is too high
  • Organic channels benefitting from the coverage start to decline
  • No one is tracking these interactions and everyone loses

Without shared data and shared accountability, teams can’t see which paid demand strengthens organic performance, experimentation happens in siloes, and your company misses out on growth.

What Column 13 Does Differently

Your marketing works best as a cohesive system. We identify all active and potential owned, earned, and paid channels and build systems to track and report on these channels. 

From there, we:

  • Get channels to learn from each other and signals from your funnel data.
  • Experiment with channel blends and cohesive or contextual messaging
  • Identify which funnel steps rely on each other
  • Reduce paid dependence as organic performance compounds
  • Reported blended CAC, optimizing quarter by quarter

Paid generates insight. Organic retains it. This allows paid to create speed and signal, while organic absorbs demand and compounds efficiency over time.

And with this, blended CAC comes down.

Protect and Improve Your Customer Economics

Sustainable growth depends on the discipline to evolve your channel mix.

Column 13 sets up and reinforces the systems that connect paid efficiency with organic durability. We work as a long-term partner, strengthening what’s already in place and building a compound marketing approach that improves year after year.

Let’s Talk