Effective marketing is at the core of any online strategy. However, all too often, people think that effective marketing is simply knowing how to advertise. Direct marketing like that is useful, and it is one of the best ways to get a short-term surge of customers when you start a campaign. However, for those long-term gains, especially on the more cost-effective side, organic marketing tends to be the stronger approach. Here, we’re going to look at the techniques that can help you grow a strong organic marketing campaign.
Understand the Funnel
The point of organic marketing is to appeal to the customers who are already likely to be interested in your product, to let them find you, rather than to go out of your way to find them. There are some customers for who the paid and direct approach will not work. They’ll come to you, all you have to do is open the path with the strategies ahead and understand what role different techniques play within the marketing funnel. From the point of awareness to interest to intent, organic marketing works best when it’s designed to act at different stages of this funnel to encourage them gently to the point of conversion. Advertisements and other forms of interruptive or direct marketing tend to rush the customer right to the end of the funnel.
Get Found
When people talk about organic marketing, there is one discipline that they tend to think of most. We’re talking about search engine optimization. It’s important to note that SEO and getting found through search engines is not the only organic marketing technique, not by a long shot, but that it does play an important role. SEO is too deep and diverse a topic, truly a discipline of multiple different strategies rather than a single tip, to cover here. However, it’s important to note that helping consumers who would be interested in your brand find your website is one of the most effective online marketing methods currently know. As such, it’s worth doing your homework and learning how to optimize your site, or at least paying someone to do it for you.
The Core of Most Online Organic Marketing
We’re going to talk about strategies that can lead people to your website organically, ways to encourage the right people to find the site, and how you can ease them further down the conversion funnel. However, one of the core strategies you’re likely to use alongside many of these other techniques is good old fashioned content. Writing valuable and compelling content such as blog posts is key, it can be content that addresses customer questions, guides related to your customers’ needs, generally helpful information, and resources for your own products and services. Writing good, valuable content is going to help draw in many potential customers, as well as keeping those who are already customers coming back.
Build a Website That Brings Them In
Content is a great component of your website and might be at the core of many different aspects of organic marketing, but you can’t forget that you have to build a website around that core, as well. Your business’s website should be well-presented, it should communicate the purpose of the site well, and it should make it easy for people to find the content or services that they need. To put it simply, enlisting the help of a web designer might be crucial if you want an effective website that constantly leads the customers down the funnel to the point of conversion. Otherwise, you could be missing opportunities every time someone clicks onto your site.
Get Social
Social media can be both organic and the other kind of marketing (whether you call it direct/paid/interruptive.) There’s nothing to stop you from posting a recently published bit of content to your social media channels, then going on to boost it so that it appears to more people, to have both a mix of social media advertisements and organic posts. However, unpaid social media posts do play a key role in helping catch the attention of people and bringing them to the website. From there, the linked content can help usher them closer to the call-to-action that leads them to the point of conversion. Of course, it’s vital that you choose the right social media platform so as to target those who are most likely to click and convert in the first place.
Get Share-Happy
Aside from crafting content that people should want to click, your aim should be to create content that people want to share, as well. Encouraging word of mouth and social engagement with your content is going to make it significantly more powerful. After all, people are a lot more willing to trust what their peers say than take the word of a business at face value. Using your community as an interim between your content and a new reader can help make its approach a lot more effective.
Make your way into their inbox
Having people discover your content through the search engine, by browsing your website, or by clicking on a social media post is all well and good. But you want to keep them clicking and reading and getting more interested as time goes on as well. If you publish content regularly, then you should consider making it part of a newsletter and using email campaign software to send it out on a regular basis. Well-formatted, professional-looking emails that regularly bring interesting content are going to encourage people to visit your site again and again. As such, even if they’re not ready to convert on their first visit, they might be on their third, fifth, tenth, or so on.
When you’re putting together your marketing campaign, it shouldn’t be a question of organic or direct marketing, organic or advertising. It should be a balance of both. It’s just often the organic side that gets abandoned for the rest, so be sure to keep it in mind.
