When it comes to being successful online, you must be able to spread brand awareness, increase the reach of your brand, generate new leads, and instill trust in customers.
However, without some form of a digital marketing strategy, none of this can be accomplished.
There are numerous marketing strategies available at your disposal that can help you stand out in a crowd, but there are two main types of marketing: organic and paid.
Both have their place, but when it all comes down to it, natural is often best. This is especially true when you don’t have the luxury of a large marketing spend.
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What is Organic Marketing?
Organic marketing is a digital marketing strategy that generates traffic to your website in a natural way as opposed to using paid advertising tactics.
Organic marketing is a long-term strategy with the goal of improving brand awareness. Rather than providing your audience with targeted ads, you are offering valuable and informative content.
If you don’t directly spend money on it to promote your brand, then it is considered a form of organic marketing. Here are a few examples:
- Blog posts
- Guest posts
- Unpaid social media posts
- Email blasts
- User-generated content
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
One thing that people tend to get confused about is that you can still spend money on your marketing campaign and have organic marketing.
After all, you will still need to invest in your overall marketing campaign as well as marketing software. Organic simply means that you aren’t paying to improve the post itself.
Keep in mind that you won’t see results from organic marketing immediately the way you would with paid advertising.
Organic marketing requires time, effort, and dedication in order to work for your brand. However, once this strategy has become well-established, you will start to notice an increase in customer acquisition and retention rates.
Why is Organic Marketing Important?
It is believed that roughly 70-80% of customers will ignore paid advertisements when they perform a search engine query.
They will focus on the organic results instead, and this is because they trust those results more.
Organic marketing is more natural, and as a result, it seems more genuine and trustworthy.
Paid advertisements tend to be seen as fake and pushy. This is why the average click-through rate of paid ads and organic results are 1.91% and 31.7% respectively.
Further, the great thing about organic marketing is that it lasts forever.
Once you put in the time and effort to get the campaign going and the results start coming in — which, again, will not occur overnight — you will have permanent sources of traffic for your website.
So, while it may take months or even years to see the results that you want, the long-term effect of organic marketing is well worth it in the end.
How to Set Up a Successful Organic Marketing Strategy
An organic marketing strategy can help convince search engines your website is what a user is looking for. Because of this, this type of marketing strategy takes time to take root.
Here are a few tips on how to get started with an organic marketing strategy.
#1: Analyze Current Traffic Habits
In order to build a solid organic marketing strategy, you need to first take a close look at the traffic habits on your website currently and then compare them to your target audience.
How are prospects currently discovering your brand? Are they using review websites? Social media platforms? Google search queries?
Where is the bulk of your organic traffic currently at? Your YouTube channel? Your e-mail newsletter? Your blog posts?
By identifying the answers to these two questions, you can determine what your audience is looking for and where they’re looking for it at.
This will allow you to develop content that your audience needs and place it on the proper platforms.
Plus, if you have organic content that is working well for you currently, you need to know what that is so you can continue to produce that same kind of content.
Without your audience, organic marketing cannot work. Therefore, you must take the time to understand your audience and what their needs/wants are.
#2: Build Up Your Content
Now that you know where your target audience spends the majority of their time, it is time to begin curating content.
Before you start writing, you should brainstorm a list of ideas based on the type of content you are creating and the platform you plan on distributing it on.
For example, if you intend to focus on blogging, you will need to perform some competitive analysis and keyword research.
From there, you can build a list of keywords you would like to rank for and create posts around. Then, it is time to develop your content.
Don’t forget to spice things up every now and then. Don’t only stick to blocks of text. Throw in some videos, images, infographics, and even downloadable resources like ebooks and white papers.
Further, as you develop your content, you will want to ensure that a significant portion of your content is evergreen.
After all, organic marketing focuses on the long-term, so a post about current events is unlikely to help your long-term traffic goals.
Evergreen content has the potential to stay alive forever. The information found within it remains valuable for days, weeks, months, and even years from the initial post date.
Some of the best types of evergreen content are lead generation interactive quizzes.
When these are done correctly, they can be recycled and posted on social media platforms every several months.
Personality quizzes are a great option because they can be easily shared, remain relevant, and help boost your engagement rates.
#3: Optimize Your Website and Content
SEO helps both the content on your site as well as your website as a whole to rank higher and more frequently on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
As a result, you can experience a boost in organic traffic.
SEO is constantly changing and is not for the faint of heart, but it is entirely possible for anyone — even beginners — to utilize it to their advantage.
You will want to ensure that you incorporate keywords into your content. You don’t want to overstuff them, as they should flow naturally with the content as a whole.
Your most relevant keyword should be included in the title tags of the content, the page description, and even image alt tags.
Every page should contain metadata as well. The role of metadata is for search engines to understand what the page or website is about.
Make sure your meta title and description contain your most relevant keyword.
#4: Utilize Social Media to Your Advantage
In order to reach as wide of an audience as possible, you must get yourself on social media. As you venture into the world of social media, you must familiarize yourself with the different platforms.
Each social media platform has its own benefits and audience.
For instance, LinkedIn is ideal for B2B organizations and is more professionally geared, whereas Pinterest is more of a visual search engine as opposed to anything text-based.
Keep in mind you don’t need to focus on just one platform, either, as you are likely to have potential customers on multiple social media platforms that you want to attract.
Just ensure that you will be able to stay present and active on the platform before you create a profile. Otherwise, you are causing more harm than good for your brand. An inactive social media business profile is not professional.
You can join some of the pages and groups within your particular niche and start participating in some of the discussions.
If you are able to share your expertise by answering a user-posted question or concern, do so.
Just try to avoid being overly promotional, as this could be a turn-off.
The goal is to get your name out there, show you can provide valuable information, and encourage users to visit your website and engage with your brand.
You will also want to do research and find out what time people are most active on the social media platform you are using. Then, you can schedule your posts accordingly to increase traffic.
Organic Marketing vs. Paid Marketing: How to Boost Business Results with Both Strategies
Organic marketing and paid marketing actually work well together. In fact, there are many instances when the two will overlap one another.
Both have the capability of driving traffic, increasing customer acquisition rates, and boosting customer conversion rates. They just do so in their own ways.
In the perfect world, paid marketing is used to attract new customers to your brand, while organic marketing is used to keep your current customers happy.
Here are a few basic tips as you embark on implementing an organic marketing and paid marketing campaign.
#1: Only Pay for Ads When You Must
You will only want to pay for social media ads that will help you reach your business goals, such as when you want to announce a new product, service, or partnership.
Organic posts have the potential to build plenty of buzz on their own if you do it right.
But when they aren’t performing the way you thought they would, you may want to consider reaching into your pockets.
#2: Boost Your Top-Performing Organic Content
If you have been doing organic marketing for some time and want to test the waters of paid marketing, one of the best ways to do so is by identifying the content that your audience has loved and paying so that it can get in front of some new sets of eyes.
This is a low-risk marketing tactic, but it can pay off well and help you get a taste of paid marketing at the same time.
#3: Automate When Possible
When it comes down to organic and paid marketing, you will be spending more time, more money, more assets, more everything.
Whether you are doing it alone or with an entire team, you want to minimize the workload so your focus can be on what’s truly important.
Therefore, you need to work to automate the bulk of your daily workflow duties as much as possible.
To do this, you want to schedule organic posts in advance, streamline the writing, approval, and editing process, and create customized triggers for your boosted posts.
These are just a few of the things you can do to get started with organic and paid marketing.
Some of your business goals will only require one or the other, while others will require a combination of them both. Either way, organic and paid marketing can help you reach your short and long-term business goals efficiently.
Wrap Up
A solid organic marketing strategy can take you far, but it is important to also consider the benefits of paid marketing when used in conjunction with organic marketing efforts.
Some tremble at the thought of creating an organic marketing strategy. However, if you can remain dedicated and committed, you will find that it is much easier to make it happen for your brand and reap the numerous benefits it can offer.
SEO is key to making organic marketing work.
So, make sure you have the knowledge to build a strong SEO strategy by checking out this guide.
