Spreading brand awareness, generating leads, increasing your brand’s reach, instilling trust among consumers, all these primarily depend on one thing: marketing.
While there can be countless unique, innovative marketing strategies that make your brand stand out from the competition, you only have access to a limited number of marketing mediums and to just two types of marketing – paid and organic.
They each come with their own advantages and disadvantages, and the best marketing strategies will make use of them both.
Organic marketing involves driving website traffic and generating and converting leads without the use of paid advertising. It’s a long-term strategy that primarily aims to help you spread brand awareness. You’ll establish yourself as an authority within your niche not by serving ads to your audience, but by providing them with valuable, insightful content.
Many things can help you boost your organic marketing efforts, but the most important elements are:
The goal is to build an emotional connection with your audience and instill trust among them. All that will eventually boost sales and establish a loyal customer base since it’s your business that they’ll think of when it comes time to make a purchase.
The results of focusing on organic marketing aren’t immediate, as it’s a process that takes time and constant dedication, and focuses mostly on the “awareness” stage of your sales funnel. However, once you’ve established your organic marketing strategy, you’ll be able to reap the long-term benefits of it by increasing both your new customer acquisition rates and customer retention rates.
The first obvious difference between organic and paid marketing is the cost. You, of course, have to invest in PPC marketing, targeted ads, Google ads, and more.
Organic marketing doesn’t require such investments. Paid marketing is also more immediate, and its results more easily measured – but it’s not more effective. This isn’t to say that paid marketing isn’t worth it. If you need quick, short-term results, paid marketing is the way to go. As mentioned, combining both paid and organic marketing into a single strategy is often the best choice.
Between 70% and 80% of customers ignore paid ads and focus solely on the organic results they receive in their searches. The reason behind this is simple: they have more trust in organic results.
Organic marketing is often compared to word-of-mouth marketing – one of the most effective marketing strategies. Since it’s more natural, it appears more trustworthy and genuine, just like personal recommendations, while paid ads are often seen as artificial and pushy. That’s why paid ads on Google have an average click-through rate of only 1.91%. Compared to this, the first organic result has an average CTR of 31.7%.
With this in mind, you still need to develop a thought-out organic marketing strategy to make it work. Let’s take a look at a few businesses that have reached their success with organic marketing.
The two most important things that you’ll need to pay attention to if your organic marketing strategy is to be successful is staying true to your brand persona and knowing your target audience.
The importance of staying true to your brand persona is obvious: you want to be recognizable, and you want your audience to have an authentic experience every time they come across your business. Knowing your target audience, understanding their pain points, and offering relevant solutions is the second piece of the puzzle, and is just as important.
The following are just some of the brands that have mastered the art of organic marketing by establishing a unique brand persona and addressing their audience’s wants and needs. So, let’s take a look at their organic marketing examples.
Mint is a popular budgeting app that’s succeeded in drawing in customers in this competitive market very quickly, all thanks to organic marketing.
When it was founded in 2006, Mint was entering an already competitive niche of personal financing, and it took innovation and dedication to stand out. The company started garnering attention by uploading dozens of blog posts, infographics, informational pieces, and more, proving just how valuable high-quality content is.
On their blog, you’ll find educational content on how to manage your budget, save more money, and manage your credit. However, there are also more entertaining posts such as “70 Acts of Kindness Ideas That Won’t Cost a Thing”. Such posts increased the online following and website traffic, helping Mint establish a mutually beneficial relationship with its audience. It also helped the company get its million and a half users.
Dollar Shave Club is a renowned company that offer razors and other personal grooming products. It’s reached its massive success by uploading a unique launch video and establishing a brand persona that’s laid-back, casual, and approachable – something we rarely see in this industry.
DSC didn’t stop at the launch video, however. It’s continued with this type of content that boosts organic marketing ever since, publishing entertaining blog posts that drive engagement.
It’s an excellent example of how a company can stand out by not taking itself too seriously. DSC’s customers enjoy the lighthearted content that’s regularly posted, and stay loyal for the entertainment as much as for the quality of product and service.
The main reason why companies fail in organic marketing is that they’re too self-promotional. They approach organic marketing in the same way they would paid marketing – focusing on their products and services, trying to show how they’re better than the competition, and so on.
What’s important to keep in mind here is that organic marketing is not about selling your products/services. It’s about offering valuable content to consumers and trying to establish a long-lasting relationship with them. This is where JetBlue stands out.
The airline has quite a Twitter following not because they offer discounts and promotions, but because they use the platform to engage directly with their customers. Their Twitter account is mainly used for improving customer service and boosting their response rates. Instead of promoting themselves, they offer informative posts that keep their customers in the know.
They remain active, publicly respond to queries and questions, and interact with their followers. It’s a simple yet effective organic marketing strategy that drives results.
Zappos is an online apparel retailer that makes use of organic marketing in a unique way. While they do have a blog that drives organic traffic, it’s their policies and their own customers that have boosted their marketing strategy.
They have consumer-friendly policies on the money-back guarantee, free shipping, and easy product returns. These policies have appealed to their consumers who’ve played a major part in improving their word-of-mouth marketing in the virtual environment. It just goes to show that organic marketing is all about putting customers first and understanding and meeting their needs and wants.
American Express created its own open forum website to provide valuable, informative content to its audiences and create a true online community. Guest authors can post their content to create discussions and offer knowledge and information on various topics, keeping the readers interested and Amex’s customers engaged. Thanks to the open forum, Amex is ranked higher on SERPs and drives massive organic traffic without needing to invest in content creators.
Developing your own organic marketing strategy is an effective way to get your business noticed in the online environment. It’s affordable to businesses of all sizes, and all it takes is some effort and commitment to make it work. If you’re just starting out with organic marketing, these are the things you’ll need to do to develop a bulletproof strategy.
Evergreen content refers to the type of content that stays fresh and relevant, regardless of how much time passes. Many people are under a misconception that every piece of content is evergreen: it stays on the internet, and consumers can access it whenever they want. But this isn’t what makes it evergreen.
If you publish an article titled “The Biggest Fashion Trends for the Summer of 2020, it will only be relevant in the summer of 2020, and no one will pay attention to it afterward. Evergreen content is supposed to provide value at any time, and it should be easy to recycle. Such content includes tutorials, how-to guides, reviews, tips, and listicles.
Among the most effective types of evergreen content are lead generation quizzes. When done right, they can be recycled and re-posted on social media every few months. In this case, personality quizzes are an ideal solution because they stay relevant, are easily shareable, and significantly increase engagement rates.
When talking about organic marketing, everyone’s first thought goes to SEO. Although it’s not the only aspect of organic marketing, it is an important one if you want to rank higher on search engines. You’ll first need to research the keywords that your target audience is using to find what they’re looking for. Then, you’ll need to come up with valuable content that offers an answer to their search.
However, what’s important to keep in mind here is that SEO isn’t simply about keywords. It’s about making your content more visible and readable for both the audience and the search engines. You’ll need to include title tags, alt text for images, backlinks, ensuring excellent loading speeds, and more.
The more user-friendly your content is, the better it will rank on search engines, and the more visitors you’ll get. Over 70% of marketers believe that SEO is much more effective than PPC. When done right, it will help you drive traffic and boost lead generation and conversion.
If you want your business to reach a wider audience, you need to create a presence on different social networks. But before you create a profile for all the popular platforms, you need to ensure that you can stay active on them.
Social media was created as a way to stay connected and involved, and if you have a business account that’s inactive, it leaves the impression of unprofessionalism. Make sure that you can post regular content. If you can’t manage this across several platforms, it’s best to stick to just one or two of them where your following is the greatest and delete the accounts that you’re not using.
Join groups and pages within your niche and participate in the discussions. Provide your expertise by answering questions posted by users, but don’t be too self-promotional.
The goal of organic marketing is to establish a relationship with your audience and boost engagement. The best way to do this is by staying in touch with your followers. You’ll need to post comments, address concerns, retweet their relevant tweets, answer their reviews (both positive and negative), and more.
For the best results, you can even offer live Q&As or engaging webinars. The more interest you show in your followers, the more interested they will be in you, and this will boost your online word-of-mouth marketing efforts.
Writing guest posts on other reputable websites is a great way to boost your organic marketing efforts. You’ll be able to include backlinks to your own site, which will improve your traffic and bring you more qualified leads. When you write a guest post, the readers will see that the site has recognized you as a trustworthy source, and they’ll see you as trustworthy as well.
You’ll establish yourself as an authority in your niche, showcase your expertise, share valuable information, and thus generate more leads in a simple and effective way. Just make sure to find a relevant and reputable site that makes sense for your business. Otherwise, the guest posts won’t be as valuable.
If you want to improve your organic marketing efforts, you need to ensure that all your content is optimized for mobile devices. Over 52% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices, and this number is expected to rise in the coming years.
With today’s consumers being ever more impatient and the market becoming ever more competitive, you need to ensure a seamless experience for every single user if you want to stay on top. If not, they won’t think twice about going to your competitors. Ensure that all your content is clearly visible across different devices and that every page is responsive and fast-loading.
Mastering the art of organic marketing is easier than it may seem, and as long as you stay dedicated and committed, you’ll be able to reap its benefits.
To make the most out of organic marketing, remember to:
These are the simplest, yet most effective ways to boost your organic marketing efforts, improve your lead generation and conversions, and increase your profits.
Become a well-rounded marketer by checking out G2's Marketing Hub, with ample resources to brush up on your marketing knowledge.
Dean Chester is a cybersecurity expert and the co-founder of research VPN provider CoolTechZone. While cryptography has been and remains his main passion, he is also interested in the political and social repercussions of internet safety issues.
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