What Is Organic Marketing
So you’ve probably heard of organic marketing before. It’s not as glamorous as spending tens of thousands of dollars on paid ads, but it definitely has its time and place.
Organic marketing refers to any type of marketing that does not directly cost you any money. Many small businesses and start-ups engage in this type of marketing because they do not have huge budgets. However, even large corporations do organic marketing, because if done right – there’s a great upside to it.
That does not mean you won’t spend any money on organic marketing. The trade-off of organic marketing is that while it does not directly cost you money, it does require time, effort, and expertise. Many people and companies choose to hire qualified experts to execute their organic strategy.
That being said, you can build a successful business with organic marketing, especially in the starting phases.
If you do have some budget to spare on marketing, I would consider spending at least a little bit to enhance and supplement your organic marketing efforts. While it is possible to be successful with a 100% organic strategy, supplementing this strategy with even a small budget will dramatically speed up your efforts.
Pros And Cons Of Organic Marketing
Pros
- Spend minimal budget: As discussed in the introduction, organic marketing doesn’t cost any money directly. It’s likely you will still spend money on labor, tools, and software – but it will cost you much less money than paid marketing.
- Build trust and brand credibility: Organic marketing generally entails some kind of content or speaking directly to your audience. This will allow you to display your expertise in your industry, company values & principles, interests, humor, and other things that will allow you to build a connection with your audience. Because of this, strong organic marketing can help you improve performance in all of your marketing efforts.
- Increased customer engagement: While it’s harder to reach larger audiences quickly with organic marketing, you have the ability to engage the people you do reach more deeply. Putting out great content tends to improve engagement, increase the amount of time your audience spends, and increase your brand loyalty.
- Build a warm audience pool: At a certain point, after enough people have come across and engaged with your organic marketing, you will start to develop a pool of people who know your brand, trust your brand, and like your brand. This pool will react much more favorably to anything your company does in the future and drive better conversion rates. Furthermore, you can often retarget people who interact with your organic marketing content later on if you decide to advertise on platforms like Google or Facebook.
Cons
- Takes some time to see results: The time it takes to see results varies depending on the type of organic marketing you are focusing on and the quality of your work. Results for SEO might be seen in 6-12 months. This can be quicker for social media marketing, especially if you pay to boost postings and promote your page. But even an organic social media marketing strategy usually takes several months to kick in. Generally, you need to spend a few months on organic marketing, no matter the type, before expecting any ROI. As a result, many firms avoid organic marketing. If you want fast results, you should try different approaches.
- Will require some time and effort: Whether you are doing Youtube marketing, SEO, or answering forums – most organic marketing will require you to produce high-quality content. Other things like design, video production, SEO best-practices, and so on will also be time consuming. That being said, any type of organic marketing will require some work.
- Will require some expertise both in your field and in the organic marketing field: To produce high-quality content, you will need expertise in your respective field. For example, if you are a company that sells life insurance, your content will have to target people interested in buying life insurance. So, you will have to create content on different life insurance topics like whole life, term life, senior life, etc. This will require expertise on life insurance. Similarly, in order to be successful in organic marketing (regardless of what field), you will also need to have expertise in organic marketing and best practices.
- Isn’t the most glamorous work: Most people will agree that organic marketing isn’t the most fun work to do. It isn’t as glamorous as paid ads where you can purchase easy impressions or clicks and just do creative work to build your campaign.
Types Of Organic Marketing
There are many different types of organic marketing. Honestly, you can always find new ways to organically market your business with some creativity and research. Here are just a few of the most common organic marketing strategies:
- Social media posts on your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, Snapchat, and Pinterest accounts. Check out our guide on executing a successful organic social media strategy.
- Social media posts on various different groups with large followings
- SEO
- Blogs
- Youtube organic strategy
- Email newsletters. Take a look at the top 14 email newsletter ideas.
- Questions Forums
- Cold emails
Should You Do Organic Marketing?
That depends on your goals and circumstances. But generally speaking, yes! If you are trying to build a business in the long haul, you should absolutely be doing organic marketing. I know that it might seem counterintuitive to be putting in a lot of work without seeing any kind of ROI for some time. However, in the long run, you will be happy you did. Because, after some time, you can get consistent results month-to-month without having to spend many hours on organic marketing. Think of it as an investment in the future.
If you are a startup without much capital to begin with, then you should definitely focus on organic marketing even more.
