Growing an audience organically is every marketer's top priority, no matter the season. While organic isn't always easy to achieve, it most certainly has long-term favorable effects. According to a recent marketing trends analysis report by EnterpriseAppsToday, "Even though there is a fight between organic and paid traffic, most traffic from SERPs is captured by organic content only. So, a company will have to attempt organic content marketing techniques as much as it can invest in paid content."
What Is Organic Channel Marketing?
Just another way of saying organic digital marketing, organic channel marketing is a set of tools and strategies that grow traffic with non-paid efforts. While nothing is ever really "free" when it comes to marketing, organic channel marketing allows you to work with non-paid activities. We'll discuss these in just a bit.
Top organic channels to consider:
- Blog posts
- Guest articles
- Organic social media posts
- SEO
- Email marketing
- User-generated content
Does Organic Channel Marketing Have Potential?
Most definitely. Here are some quick stats for you to see for yourself how effective organic channel marketing can be:
- 50 percent of marketers say keyword rankings and organic traffic are the top ways they measure the success of their marketing.
- 82 percent of B2B marketers leveraged Twitter for organic marketing in 2021.
- Over 90 percent of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for organic social marketing.
Implemented to attract organic website traffic as one of the primary reasons, organic channel marketing is here for the long haul. Here's why:
It Builds Trust and Brand Authority
There are a few things that money can't buy — trust is one of them. While you can (and should) retarget your organic visitors with paid ads, getting these visitors through the door is something that's best done with organic efforts. Ranking organically is no easy task, but it's one that'll most certainly build trust and authority among your audience.
It Drives Highly Credible Site Traffic
Whether done through SEO or content creation or a combination (our recommendation), when done right, it's a great way to pull in the right site traffic. Depending upon how much the traffic matches your buyer personas, it could be incredibly useful in terms of conversion later on. We should mention that this, in most cases, doesn't happen overnight but slow and steady definitely wins the race. Invest in relevant content creation, an in-depth organic SEO strategy, and mapping all of the content to the user journey for best results.
It Saves Money
We did say that nothing really is ever free in marketing. However, it's the relative cost that makes a huge difference in the long run. The cost of creating a piece of content with the right keyword strategy and buyer persona mapping vs. hitting any visitor with lots of paid ads in the absence of the former can have a real impact (good or bad) on your organic spend. Building an organic audience also leads to owning keywords in your space later on for which you otherwise would have to spend a lot of PPC money on.
Also read: The Do's and Don'ts of Paid Marketing
Organic Channel Marketing — How to Start Implementing
Investing in an organic channel does mean higher value and compounded benefits in the long run. And as part of your larger growth marketing strategy, it could mean continuous growth that we also talk about in our sustainable growth engine DIY course. But it needs to be implemented right in order to see good results … organically! Let's dive into how we can achieve that.
1. Analyze Current Traffic Trends
There are a bunch of ways traffic can get in, and by analyzing these ways, you could start understanding the trend. Is it mostly coming by organic search or by blog posts? Is it coming from branded keywords or other SEO efforts? Is it coming from social media? Or email newsletters? Or podcasts/webinars? Or YouTube? Or a little bit from all?
If most of your communication channels are bringing in traffic, that's a good thing, but if the traffic is mostly scattered without a recognizable pattern, then it's probably not. Pay attention to key traffic drivers and observe the past one-year trend to make notes of any patterns. Once you have comprehensive data on it, start working in the direction where you'd like to see more traffic come from.
You could take another look at your SEO strategy and if it's mostly keyword-driven, you can start implementing a pain-point-driven strategy as well to answer long-tail search queries. Rewrite blog posts that aren't getting much traffic but are still ranking for a number of keywords on the second and third page of SERPs and have strong backlinking already. By looking at what you can already optimize, you'll start shifting gears in the right direction soon.
2. Create Content for Organic Keywords and Backlinking Opportunities
As earlier stated, first take a look at what you can optimize. There's a high chance you already have a lot of content sitting on your site that is either old or redundant. Conduct a blog audit, and if there are pieces older than two years, mark these for rewrite candidates if they qualify. Some might just take a yearly update with minor changes in the copy, such as adding a short infographic or a video. There are two goals here: to get more organic keywords and backlinks and create content that ranks faster.
To address the second goal, take a look at creating more evergreen content that could also be timely depending upon the industry. But in most B2B markets, unless it's a product such as Zoom or any other video conferencing tool (and the market has hit a pandemic), then you know you could create more timely content and encourage people to test your product. Otherwise, creating evergreen content that you can make minor updates to each year is one of the most effective ways to have your content ranking better.
3. Create Data-Driven and Data-Informed Content
Whether it's white papers or infographics or short data reports, it's always useful to create more data-driven and data-informed content pieces that could be link-worthy as well. Data-driven content is pieces that are driven from the data you've gathered internally or from a third-party source. Data-informed content is pieces that are created by curating other data-driven pieces on the internet, such as yearly marketing studies, for example. In both cases, there are high chances of strong backlinking and keyword rankings if implemented well.
Both kinds of content pieces would be great as blogs that only have infographics, short blog reports that could also be used as lead-gen assets if it's your internal data study, PR placements (again, if it's your internal data study), quick social media videos and carousels, and more. The opportunities are really out there and won't run you a huge grocery bill on marketing.
4. Distribute Content for Organic Results
Now, creating content is one thing, but content distribution is a completely different game altogether. It's possible that most of your content is not getting much traffic because it was not distributed well in the first place. This is something you could also summarize from what we did in step 1 above. Take a look at your traffic and where it's coming from. Create an in-depth content distribution strategy for the channels where there's not much attributed and you'd like to see more attribution.
Apart from sharing on social channels, you could conduct content outreach to try and place your best pieces of content on other free platforms such as Quora, Slack, Slideshare, Medium, Reddit, and StumbleUpon, and reach out to sites where you would like to see your content linked to. You could also distribute your infographics and data reports on free sites, which are effective in generating more backlinks when the content is more top of the funnel than middle and bottom.
Organic Channel Marketing Doesn't Mean No PPC
We are here for organic channel marketing, BUT we aren't against PPC. That said, we're confident that once you start implementing organic marketing strategies, you'll see great results that also last longer than PPC. We recommend that you keep pressing forward on that since it might take some time before you see any results.
If you have the budget and you'd like to implement PPC efforts as well, one of the most efficient ways to do that is retargeting your organic traffic with conversion-focused posts, videos, reports, etc. — whatever will help organic visitors become customers.
If you're looking for the right support to help grow your organic channel marketing, take a look at our packages and pick the one that your business needs the most right now.
