The Complete Guide to Organic Marketing
“Organic search drives 53% of website traffic.” - Analysis by BrightEdge Research in 2019
While in 2014, this percentage was found to be 51%, over the next five years, its growth by 2% highlights how search engines like Google have invested quite a bit for enhancing the user experience such that it provides the users with highly relevant and increasingly accurate search results.
However, organic marketing does not revolve only around Google’s algorithm. Rather, it revolves around all the platforms through which you can organically market your goods and services. What cannot be denied is that organic marketing has become increasingly complex these days. This has made several users shift to paid search engine marketing either completely or in part.
The importance of organic marketing to ensure the success of your business cannot be negated. Having your customers come to you naturally over a period of time is definitely more beneficial for your business in the long term. This is because it ensures customer loyalty as well as increased customer retention, which will ultimately bring in more revenue for your business.
Hence, in this world of changing algorithms, marketing strategies, buyer personas, and customer’s pain points, having a complete understanding of organic marketing and all that it entails would be a boon for you, your business, and your company- if in case you are a marketing manager or work in one of the several marketing job roles available.
This article on organic marketing will be your go-to-guide for organic marketing. The topics it covers are:
- What is Organic Marketing?
- Organic Marketing vs. Inorganic Marketing
- Benefits of Organic Marketing
- 11 Most Common Organic Marketing Services
- 4 Prerequisites for Getting More Organic Traffic
- Organic Marketing Strategies
- How Can Deskera Help You with Organic Marketing?
- Key Takeaways
- Related Articles
What is Organic Marketing?
Organic marketing is an umbrella term for a natural and value-based marketing strategy that is used to drive website traffic, generate leads and increase conversion rate. Organic marketing hence is any form of digital marketing that does not involve paid ads. Instead, organic marketing involves all those marketing tactics that will cost-effectively and naturally generate business for you over a long time.
Organic marketing will require you to invest your blood, sweat, and tears in maintaining your social accounts like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, building your email lists, improving your SEO, revising and reinventing your user interface, and many more such distinctive, yet natural marketing efforts.
In exchange for all your efforts, the audience that you get in touch with and the customers who buy from you will become your authentic customers. These would also more likely become returning customers for your business.
The primary goals of any organic marketing campaign are:
- Building an emotional connection with your target audience
- Winning the trust of your target audience
- Building long-term business relationships that would also bring benefits like referral sales for your business
Organic marketing hence tends to be focused on the awareness phase of your sales funnel.
What needs to be understood is that organic marketing is not free. It does involve costs of the marketing team, marketing campaigns, software, and any other expenses that you will incur in order to follow and complete your organic marketing plan.
Organic Marketing vs. Inorganic Marketing
Organic marketing refers to all the tactics employed to make your customers come to your digital channel naturally over a period of time. In contrast, inorganic marketing refers to all the tactics employed by paying for them- i.e., paid advertising, where your target audience would be shown ads while they are browsing through a particular platform because you paid for it.
The key to organic marketing is consistency and content. Here, in order to get higher visibility and traffic across different platforms, you do not have to pay to companies like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and many more. In contrast, inorganic marketing and all the traffic it brings in is only for a short period of time. Once your advertising budget is used up, your engagement and traffic will fall as well. In the long run, organic marketing is hence more beneficial to your company.
While organic marketing helps you build your own authentic audience and domain authority, inorganic marketing helps you reach a group of people who are a good fit with your brand and who you want to reach. Organic marketing is a long-term process and shows results in the long run, whereas inorganic marketing is a short-term process and shows immediately.
While organic marketing is less expensive, more trustworthy, and results in you getting customers that trust you and will stay with you for a long-time, inorganic marketing is more expensive, less trustworthy, and less effective in the long run. In fact, while inorganic marketing does help in quickly reaching a wider audience, out of those reached, the ratio of the ones who become your followers and customers is sparse and farther apart. This ratio is higher in the case of organic marketing.
But, considering their different advantages as well as focus, it is together that they result in the most successful and efficient brand marketing strategies, which also achieves all your marketing objectives.
Benefits of Organic Marketing
While determining the value of organic marketing is difficult, what we do know is that it mostly fills up the top part of a sales funnel. Organic marketing is aimed at developing an emotional connection with your customers either through entertaining content or through informational content such that your business is always on the top of their minds while making a purchasing decision.
In fact, the brand engagement and social awareness achieved through organic marketing is something that cannot be achieved through paid marketing, and it is these two main factors that result in increasing conversion rates in your business. Organic marketing hence is also the perfect backup plan for your paid marketing efforts which results in significantly lowering the cost per click while also increasing return on investment.
Thus, the benefits of organic marketing are:
Helps in Building Brand Authority
Several research studies have shown that consumers prefer to purchase from brands that they trust. Establishing your brand’s authority and winning consumers’ trust for it is not something that you will secure just by spending some money. Instead, it is something that can be built and won over a long period of time through hard work and consistency.
Once your business has established its brand authority, it would mean that your business would now be carrying an invaluable and distinctive status that will largely influence all your prospective buyers. To establish a strong branding authority, you should focus on the unique properties of your products and services.
For example, if your business is engaging in content marketing, in that case, you would be establishing your brand authority through regular posting of authoritative posts with fresh and compelling content. In fact, your brand would also be proving itself as credible through the same posts.
What needs to be noted is that brand authority is also a significant factor that influences your organic search ranking on Google.
Audience Engagement Gets Improved
One of the primary goals of any marketing strategy is to develop authentic and personal relationships with your consumers, such that they would be more convinced to purchase from you because of it.
Whether you are promoting new services and products, answering questions, or solving problems, organic marketing tactics are the best ways to not only educate your customers but also increase their engagement.
In fact, in this overcrowded world of sellers, products, and services, one of the best ways of improving your engagement, and turning your visitors into leads that will move down the sales cycle to become your customers, is by interacting with them directly and making your own community. It is because of this reason that Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are some of the best platforms to increase your audience engagement.
Remember, in order to increase audience engagement on your social media profile, you should promote links, have content that asks questions- which can be answered by your audience, content that is engaging to the extent that your customers feel like commenting on them and so on.
The more engaging your content is, the more personal your community will be, which will, in the long run, not only improve your net profits but also encourage returning customers.
Organic Marketing is Cost Efficient
While paid marketing strategies quickly generate visibility for your business, it tends to get very expensive very quickly. In fact, relying solely on paid marketing will also reduce its effectiveness and a loss of its benefits in the long run.
In contrast, organic marketing is a cost-effective way of developing your brand voice, increasing your audience’s engagement, and boosting your website traffic. The investments involved in organic marketing are your time, efforts, and some expenses involved in regards to having a team helping you out with your business’s organic marketing.
The benefit of organic marketing and the investments you do therein is that its fruits of success stay with your business for a long time. In fact, with continuing organic marketing, you can continue to grow your benefits from the fruits that have already grown.
Additionally, by developing a holistic approach to organic marketing, you would also be able to achieve your sales goals and expand your business while keeping your organic marketing expenditure to the minimum.
Drives Organic Visibility
One of the best ways of getting your business noticed in this all the time digital environment is by having a holistic, organic marketing strategy.
In fact, once you have attracted your targeted amount of traffic through organic marketing, you have them for life. This hence gives you a permanent traffic source that widens your reach, as well as drives visitors to your site.
This is, however, conditional to how well you keep up with your organic marketing tactics. For instance, guest posts, industry blog posts, and social media updates are some of the permanent sources that are discoverable through search and to which you can link your site.
Such organic tactics would even be able to convince search engines like Google that the content provided by you is valuable and relevant to what the searchers are looking for.
In fact, organic marketing also promotes word-of-mouth marketing as people will visit your website to see what your consumers are saying about you.
11 Most Common Organic Marketing Services
Out of the varied organic marketing platforms available for you, which one is the most appropriate, depends on your business and its products and services. Some of the most widely used organic marketing platforms are:
- Social Media- Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat
- PR and Influencer Marketing- Digital PR, Influencer Marketing
- Content Marketing- YouTube, Blogging, Content Sharing
- SEO
We will now take a more detailed look at each of these organic marketing channels and services.
Facebook is the largest social media network as it provides its users with a wide range of options through which they can connect with their users without having to resort to paid advertising. Along with letting you create your business page, you can even join groups that will help you connect with your niche.
In fact, these groups will also help you build your brand authority by letting you become the expert on the subject, directly buying and selling in the marketplace, and even managing events without having to pay any costs.
Additionally, to back your organic marketing strategies, including the ones undertaken on Facebook, you can even resort to paid Facebook ads to increase the effectiveness of your campaign.
Instagram’s popularity is more amongst the younger generation and is quickly overtaking Facebook for many other generations too. Instagram is an image-based platform through which you can share quick and small snippets of content.
Instagram and the type of content you upload on it is most suitable if your business has a very specific niche like small dogs, boho fashion, sustainable travel, and so on. The content you post related to your niche will lead to you gaining more followers with the same interest, hence leading to you building a community for your business by using this organic marketing channel.
Pinterest is an image-based platform as well. However, unlike what happens in Instagram, Pinterest lets its users collect inspirations on their boards- which they can then come back later to visit. In fact, out of all the social media platforms, Pinterest has the highest conversion rate and is especially good as well as popular for visual businesses like interior designing and fashion.
LinkedIn is a professional social platform that is designed especially for business networking. In contrast to the quick and small content involved in Facebook marketing, Instagram marketing, and Pinterest marketing, LinkedIn users prefer a long-form or new content style that is focused on solving a problem or discussing an issue in detail. LinkedIn is the most appropriate platform if your business wants to share B2B content and connect with other business people.
Snapchat
If compared with the other social media platforms discussed above, Snapchat allows its users to share short videos and photos with their followers. This platform is appropriate for your business if your target audience is the younger generations and the goal of your marketing campaign is to increase your brand awareness and strengthen your brand positioning statement.
Digital PR
Digital PR is closely intertwined with content marketing and involves your business making connections with bloggers and editors of trusted online publications. They would then be sharing your business’s content on their site and social media, bringing in more traffic to your page through them. This is hence one of the ways in which you can connect with your target audience and generate more leads.
However, oftentimes digital PR takes months to receive a single back-link. However, if your business has contacted a trusted publication, then your digital PR campaign can lead to massive growth over a period of time.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is one of the ways in which you can organically market your business and the products and services that you offer. By contacting a trustworthy, credible, and like-minded influencer to market your business, you would be able to tap into their followers and get more customers or at least leads that can be converted into customers from them.
The influencer would be using their own credibility to recommend your business, and this hence tends to be as personal and trustworthy as word-of-mouth marketing and recommendation is.
YouTube Marketing
YouTube Marketing is a type of content marketing. However, while YouTube seems like a content channel, it is, in fact, the second most powerful and popular search engine after google. YouTube offers the chance to directly share your video content related to your business.
Such videos allow your prospective customers to know you properly before they make a purchasing decision. YouTube marketing is the best organic marketing channel for your business if your business offers knowledge-based services like advisors and counselors.
Blogging
A blog of your business should be a standalone website that should either give useful information related to the problems faced by your consumers or have entertaining content that will drive visitors towards your website. Either of these content is designed such that it directs your target customers towards your products and services or towards a particular section of your website.
Blogging is also good for your SEO, as it increases the number of keywords as well as the freshness of your site. The key to doing blogging correctly is tracking your core web vitals and making the necessary changes.
Content Sharing
These are in reference to user-generated content sites on the internet like Quora and Reddit. Through these sites, you would be able to get more website visitors and brand authority within your niche.
Quora is a question, and answer tool, where the users post questions, and anyone can give the answer to it. In contrast, Reddit is a conversational platform. In order to use either of these two platforms, you should search for common questions or topics of discussion in your niche and then provide a detailed answer for the same.
In your answer, you can link back the content to your website, which will then drive interested readers to your website, leading to an increase in your sales. What needs to be noted here is that you will have to invest in actually writing an answer, rather than just posting a link, in order to ensure that your answer is not marked as spam.
SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of the other ways of organic marketing. This falls in the category of organic digital marketing and is the process of improvising your website in a manner that it gets found by search engines more nicely.
Considering that the algorithms of search engines like Google are constantly changing, your SEO strategies should be a perfect combination of technical website optimization, content marketing, as well as social media marketing. SEO has also become an important key for the success of your organic marketing efforts.
4 Prerequisites for Getting More Organic Traffic
When you are going to put in all your efforts in your organic marketing campaigns, you should first make sure that your business has the basic layout for succeeding. The four prerequisites for getting more organic traffic, a steady stream of potential customers, higher chances of converting leads into purchasing customers, and hence having a successful organic marketing campaign are:
- Great and profitable product
- Substantial target audience interested in buying the type of product or service that you are offering.
- Addressable target market refers to a group of people who share similar values, behaviors, and other qualities that you can focus on during your organic marketing campaign.
- A great and compelling product story for your product descriptions and your website to convert visitors into buyers.
Organic Marketing Strategies
With all the long-term benefits that come with organic marketing, it becomes very important for you to make use of the following organic marketing strategies:
Focus on Evergreen Content
The best way to keep your website come at the top in the search results is by having SEO-optimized and evergreen content. Evergreen content is one that stays fresh and relevant long after it has been published during your organic marketing campaign.
Your content should hence be of the kind that retains value not only for a month or a year but long after, hence compelling readers to visit your page for it. One of the best advantages of having evergreen content is that you can refurbish it as per the most recent trends and publish it like brand new content.
The various formats that you can choose for your evergreen content are:
- Infographics
- Blog posts
- Case studies
- Videos
- White papers
- Landing pages
- Tutorials
- Guides
- Industry resources
- Frequently asked questions
And many more. The format you choose depends on your product and services, as well as on your brand identity.
Optimizing Your Content with SEO
One of the most important aspects and key to success for organic marketing is having search engine optimized content. A search engine optimized content is one that does not only have all the main and relevant keywords but is also high-quality, unique, and valuable content for your visitors.
This means that if you have written an original blog post on a certain topic from a different perspective than what other published articles have taken and also offers more value, then such a blog post would rank better than other similar pieces. Better ranked content is immediately perceived as more trustworthy, hence also bringing in more customers for your business.
Some of the fundamentals for having SEO optimized content are:
- Length- Longer posts, more than 1000+ words, tends to rank better in the search engine results.
- Readability- Search engines like Google rank easily readable content better than those that are harder to read.
- The Tone of Voice- You should have a consistent tone of voice in your blog posts.
- Formatting- You should use images, headlines, and bullet points to streamline the navigation of your content.
- Links- Your content should be linked to other pages on your website and to other high-authority sites as well.
However, you should remember that keywords are a crucial part of SEO-optimized content as they tell the search engines what your content is about.
Hence, doing research on keywords would help you find not only what your target audience is searching for but will also help you decide the topics on which you should publish your content to attract that target audience.
Developing Engaging and Value-Driven Content
In order to create engaging and value-driven content for your target audience, you should know their goals, dreams, passions, and even their pain points. You should have an answer to the following questions:
- What are their most common struggles?
- What are they looking to solve?
- What is stopping them from achieving their goals?
Having an understanding of your prospective customer’s pain points will help you design your content in the manner that the solution to their problem lies in your products or services. On top of this, by providing solutions to their problems, you would also be establishing your business’s identity as an expert in the subject matter.
To make your content engaging, you should also take care of the spelling and grammar used and strategically use visuals to make your assets look more professional, attractive, and compelling.
Improve Your Visibility with White Hat Links
To build your website’s authority and increase site traffic, back-links are critical. One of the best ways to develop a back-link profile is by using white hat SEO techniques. “White Hat” are techniques that comply with Google's webmaster’s guidelines and takes an ethical approach for improving your organic visibility and ranking.
Some of these white hat strategies for meeting the goals of your organic marketing are:
- Building back-links through guest posting or guest blogging.
- Using contextual links in your content. Contextual links are the relevant links found in your blog piece. These help bring awareness to your blog and website and boost your credibility through high authority sources. Contextual links hence boost the overall effectiveness of your organic marketing campaign.
Optimize Your Content for Mobile Devices
Several studies suggest that up to 54% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices. This brings to light how important it is for you to optimize your organic marketing content for mobile devices.
A mobile-optimized content should be one that displays correctly, loads quickly, and gives an overall experience that compels your visitors to stay on your website and not go to your competitor’s website.
In fact, considering that users tend to run searches more through their mobile devices, Google has moved to ranking mobile-optimized content first and above desktop optimized content. Some of the qualities of mobile-optimized content are:
- 100% responsive design
- Fast page load speeds
- Larger buttons
- Compressed images
- Auto-filling forms
- Location auto-detection
- Ability to checkout as guest
- Multiple screens instead of scrolling
Considering the trends of current users, it is important to optimize your organic marketing content for mobile technology, for only then would you be able to target a wider audience and maximize your organic traffic.
Give Due Importance and Attention to Social Media
Today, social media has become the hub of organic marketing and other business activities. It has become the go-to medium through which you can increase your customer acquisition and engage your followers, know your customer’s feedback and make the necessary changes in your products and services.
Hence, being active on your social media is crucial for the success of your organic marketing strategies. Before you make your social media account on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., you should be sure that you will stay active on it because an inactive social media account will show your business as unprofessional and hence be detrimental to it.
An active social media account is one which:
- Regularly posts updates
- Leaves comments
- Replies to comments
- Retweets and re-shares
- Posts stories and posts
- Answers to queries and questions
And so on.
You should be showing interest to your followers, for only then would they return back the favor. You can even partner with an influencer to promote your content. Social media is important for your organic marketing campaigns as it will let you build genuine relationships with your followers and get engagement on your content.
Some of the Other Organic Marketing Strategies
Some of the other organic marketing strategies that would be very beneficial to your business are:
- Reread and reconsider the descriptions and blurbs on your website. Check how you can optimize it further. Replace the outdated information with the new and updated information to keep your content fresh and valuable.
- Evaluate the usefulness of the pages to which you have hyperlinked, and make sure that the links are working properly.
- Craft and improve your email marketing strategy.
- Implement call-to-actions that will engage your readers immediately. CTAs work if you are organizing an event, selling a product or service, and even when you are delivering new content to your subscribers.
- Find and follow complementary businesses on your social media. Develop relations with them through direct communication. You can even like and share their posts and tweets.
- Be aware of the social media trends and incorporate them in your content while highlighting your brand identity.
- Familiarize yourself with hashtags and which are the best fit for your business and its organic marketing strategies.
- Understand all the social media tools and how they impact your reach.
- Complete your social media profiles, as this is the first thing your visitors will see to know you. Your social media profile should clearly communicate who you are, what it is that you do and why you do it.
- Make sure your business appears in free online directories.
- Consider finding and joining Twitter chats, Facebook groups, etc., that are connected to your field. This will help you in expanding your network, gain visibility and even demonstrate your expertise.
How Can Deskera Help You with Organic Marketing?
Deskera CRM should be your organic marketing tools. This is because by using them, you will be able to automate your marketing efforts. Here, you will be able to automate your organic marketing campaigns.
Be it generating leads by sending emails through Deskera CRM, only to then be able to view the performance through detailed analytics on open rates and click-through rates, or be it creation of landing pages with lead magnets, forms, product pages, opt-in pages, and CTAs using Deskera CRM and the templates that it comes pre-configured with, these softwares have automated all that can be automated from your organic marketing efforts.
In fact, you would even be able to better manage workplace stress and even considerably reduce it by using these softwares. Additionally, through Deskera CRM, you would even be able to select any high-conversion funnel template for your organic marketing campaign to convert your visitors into leads and then into customers.
By using Deskera CRM+, you would even be able to automate follow-ups as well as track the performance of your organic marketing campaign at each step in the funnel. This will help you optimize it, wherever needed, based on optimizable data.
Deskera CRM and CRM+ will give the boost that your organic marketing campaign needs while also letting you segment your leads based on their interests and challenges so that you can target them later through personalized campaigns.
Key Takeaways
Organic marketing is the core of any business growth plan, and this is a reality that is here to stay. In fact, sometimes, organic marketing is also known as inbound marketing because it is best used for:
- Developing your brand voice
- Educating your audience
- Enabling authentic interactions with your audience
- Drive traffic to your website and other online assets
- Encourages emotional connection between your customers and your brand
Organic marketing drives traffic to the top of your sales funnel at the “awareness stage.” However, the organic marketing campaigns also play a role during the “consideration stage,” where the buyers would be comparing their options before making their purchase decision.
Organic marketing is the best strategy to build a long-lasting brand and establish your brand authority in your industry. In fact, all that organic marketing helps in achieving is the way by which you can ensure a positive brand experience to your customers.
In fact, studies have shown that customers are 131% more likely to make a purchase after having consumed early-stage educational content. This hence means that after having organic marketing efforts at the start of their sales cycle, you can back it up further with paid marketing to have quick sales and results.
However, remember that organic marketing will be slow in giving you results and in achieving your marketing objectives. To have successful organic marketing campaigns, you will need dedication, commitment, and consistency. These three qualities, along with the organic marketing services and strategies, will set you down for success.
To help you along this path to success, you should use Deskera CRM and CRM+, which will not only help you in setting up and tracking landing pages, CTAs, and email marketing but also help you track other relevant marketing KPIs to monitor your performance and make the necessary changes.