Organic Marketing: 5 Organic Marketing Tactics

Organic marketing describes unpaid tactics that increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your site, and result in lead generation—all without spending money on paid marketing strategies. Organic marketing involves growing your audience through nonpaid efforts like social media posts, a blog that improves your rank on search engine results, or email marketing campaigns. Businesses use organic marketing as a cost-effective way to build a loyal audience.

While organic marketing involves building a customer base using original content on marketing channels (without an advertising budget), paid marketing includes tactics in which you pay for exposure or visibility with your target audience. Paid advertising involves pushing an ad to existing customers and potential customers who have yet to follow or engage with your company. Common digital paid ad formats include banners on websites or graphics and videos on social platforms.

Organic marketing has many benefits that make it a worthwhile investment for large and small businesses that want to build brand awareness on a budget. Consider the following pros of an organic strategy when preparing your content marketing plan and organic social media strategy:

1. 1. Builds an authentic audience: Organic marketing involves building your customers’ trust over an extended period. This can lead to more customer loyalty, higher conversion rates, and genuine interest in your business since they have an emotional connection to your brand.
2. 2. Provides a low-budget marketing strategy: Effective organic marketing requires significant time and effort to make it successful, but you will not have to spend large amounts of money—besides paying for staff time—to see results. If you see success with your organic digital marketing strategy, consider spending some of your marketing budget to boost your organic efforts for even better results.
3. 3. Sets your business up for long-term success: A robust organic marketing strategy is a solid foundation on which you can build your business. This low-cost marketing effort helps you build a strong base of customers that engage with your content and spread awareness via word-of-mouth marketing.

While organic marketing can be a budget-friendly way to create a loyal customer base, there are a few downfalls to relying entirely on organic marketing for your business.

• May limit your customer base: Your organic marketing efforts may reach fewer potential customers than a paid marketing campaign. Over time you might be able to capture a wider market, but paid marketing can tap into any demographic or target market in the short term.
• Often takes much longer to see results: Organic marketing works slowly to build an audience and develop trust with your customers. Paid marketing costs more, but you can get your content in front of your new customers quickly, resulting in faster conversions.
• Requires effort and ingenuity: Developing an organic marketing strategy involves multiple types of content across many channels, including blog posts, social media, and email marketing. You and your team will need to consistently make quality content over a long period before you start seeing solid results.

A robust marketing plan should include organic marketing campaigns. Some organic tactics include:

1. 1. Creating a blog with evergreen content: Create a list of blog post ideas and aim to post one blog a week to begin to drive organic traffic. Consider what your customer wants to learn and keep your blog content clear and informative. Prioritize evergreen content (content that your customers always find relevant) instead of dated or trending stories. Experiment with inviting influencers to write guest posts or creating infographics to make your organic content more engaging.
2. 2. Developing an email marketing strategy: Email marketing keeps you connected to a regular customer base, offering newsletters with company updates, promotions, and announcements about sales and new products. Effective email marketing campaigns can boost your e-commerce by using deals and promotions to drive customer engagement. Many email service providers (or ESPs)—companies that allow you to build email lists, craft emails, and send them—offer services to make starting an email marketing campaign accessible and affordable.
3. 3. Focusing on a solid social media presence: Posting content on your social media platforms is free and a great way to drive engagement and get eyes on your product. Create a content calendar to be consistent with your posts, and consider how each piece of content relates to your audience. Posting on your social channels will help encourage sharing and increase your word-of-mouth marketing.
4. 4. Optimizing your site for a high organic search ranking: SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is a digital marketing tactic for attracting targeted traffic to a website through organic or non-paid rankings on a search engine results page (SERP). Unlike paid results such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements, organic search results rank high in search engines because of quality content that answers query searches and features key terms. Begin your SEO strategy with keyword research to find the top keywords related to your business. Then, create relevant blog content based on those keywords to drive website traffic and optimize your site’s landing page to help improve the user experience.
5. 5. Sharing case studies or white papers: Write case studies to help your audience better understand how your products and services will help them. Companies can also use a white paper to announce new products or services to the general public. You can distribute them via an internet landing page that you can promote through a blog post, podcast, paid marketing, or organic search engine traffic.

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