As a business owner, you are tasked with wearing many hats, but two of the most important are sales and marketing. Without marketing, you have no sales, and without sales, you have no business. Today we are focusing specifically on organic marketing because most small businesses are very budget conscious and organic marketing has a lower price tag.
What is Organic Marketing?
Organic marketing gets your customers to come to you naturally over time, instead of artificially via paid ads. It is less expensive than paid advertising and results take longer to appear. Organic marketing is evergreen, while paid advertising is usually only good while you are paying.
Organic marketing consists of four primary strategies: content, SEO, social media, and lead generation. When organic marketing is combined with a customer appreciation strategy to keep people coming back and promoting your business, it is a powerful marketing tool.
Content
Did you know that Google and other search engines do not create their content? They rely on users to provide great content. Then they can do their job, which is to deliver the best results for those looking for information. Blog articles and website pages are pieces of content that can be optimized to show up in a search result. So logically it makes sense to have as much great content out there as you can. Each piece of content is written with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind, which leads us to the next aspect of organic marketing.
SEO
We will use Google in this example since they hold over 87% of the market share. When someone requests a search using voice or typed text, Google has less than a second to produce the best list of answers. For example, I just typed in “what percentage of search market goes to google” and in .74 seconds I had 794 million results.
Your website and blog content become an evergreen organic marketing source when written with SEO in mind. The first stop for Google is the title tag, which is created on the backend of your website. Then there are a few other stops as well. The main point is that you need to make it easy for search engines to see that you have the information that the person is searching for.
Social Media
As of today, there are 1.5 billion websites online creating much more competition for businesses than just 10 years ago. The days of just having a website are over. Social media is an essential piece of organic marketing. Social allows you to connect with your customers and increase awareness of your brand. You get to know them better and they get to know you. Organic social media is the only way to connect at that level with your followers.
With 88% of people trusting online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts, and 81% of people saying they’re influenced by what their friends share on social media, an organic social strategy is imperative to building positive brand perception and share-of-voice. ~ SocialMediaToday.com
Lead Generation
Organic marketing is all about lead generation. A simple lead funnel might begin with you sharing content from your website using your social networks. Then they share it with their friends. Now people are on your website seeing special offers you’ve created just for them. Once they are customers, they start talking about you to their friends on social media and the cycle starts again.
Using organic marketing can be very time consuming and requires detailed strategies to make it work. The good news is that you can hire out content creators and social media experts to make sure your budgets are used wisely. If you consider what one new customer is worth to you, then you will see how affordable it is to get help from the experts. And they will not bring you one new customer, but many.
Are you interested in social media content creation services? At The Social Expansion Project, we help our clients grow their social media audience and engagement with organic social media marketing methods. We implement a strategy first method to create custom marketing plans for each client. Want to learn more? Request a consultation today!
