Leveraging Organic Marketing
Product marketing is all about engineering campaigns and content to organically grow your audience.
Organic marketing is the opposite of advertising and buying media. Instead of ads, organic marketing looks for ways to create value that people will share with each other.
Product marketing relies heavily on the organic approach to marketing. The overarching goal is to create value for your audience. When you do this well, people will naturally want to share it with their friends and followers which in turn grow the brand’s image, increase engagement and ultimately secure commitments from their audiences.
The opposite of paid media
Organic or natural marketing is the opposite of advertising and buying media. This is how you get your name out there, build brand awareness and make a good impression on customers. It’s free, but it takes a lot of work, because it only uses earned and owned media (media you already have access to).
Another big difference from traditional “paid media”, is the organic approach focuses on building trust and authority with consumers over time by showing them useful information rather than trying too hard sell something right away.
While you don’t need to spend any money to do organic marketing, it’s not as easy as it sounds. You have to work hard at getting noticed on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter by creating good content that people want to share with their friends — that’s organic reach in action.
It might sound like organic marketing isn’t much different from paid advertising — and sometimes they are similar — but one key difference between them is that organic marketing strives for authenticity where people trust on your content because they know it wasn’t paid for to get their attention. People have become so numb to advertisements.
Ads are expensive
Unlike ads, organic marketing doesn’t interrupt people, it doesn’t force them to watch something they’re not interested in, and it doesn’t try to make them do anything other than just experience your brand as a part of their day-to-day lives.
This natural approach is about building a brand by creating value that people will share with each other. It’s about being authentic, not spammy or pushy.
Organic marketers actively create opportunities for people to learn more about their products or services without being asked directly to do so — because they know that once someone finds out more about what you have to offer, they’ll want it!
Creating value
Content produced by organic-oriented product marketers is more targeted, cost-effective and authentic than advertising. And because it comes from a genuine place, organic marketing is also more sustainable than advertising. It’s designed to be informative and educational.
Organic marketers look for ways to create value that people will naturally want to pass on by word-of-mouth — and in many cases, they’re already doing this.
People who are enthusiastic about their products or services are already sharing them with others through personal recommendations or social media posts. Now its making sure these conversations happen where your target audience is hanging out online (or offline).
What do product marketers use to attract consumers organically?
Product marketers who want to build a successful organic marketing strategy will need to invest a lot of time to understand their target audience. Probe into their demographics, geographies, psychographics and firmographics to create a taxonomy of segments and a set of relevant of personas.
They will also need to start thinking about specific goals they want to achieve with their organic campaigns for the month/quarter/year along with key metrics to track.
Once they’ve clearly identified the audience, and a list of some goals to achieve, then they need to produce the content that speaks directly to that audience by posting it across relevant media channels and other platforms where you target audiences are hanging out. This can be done using:
- Social media posts
- Thought leadership pieces (podcasts, news articles, etc.)
- Word-of-mouth referrals
- Email nurturing campaigns
To help you measure the effectiveness of your organic marketing efforts on digital platforms, you can rely on the standard KPIs used by digital marketing like % of people who are aware of your brand, how many visitors came to your website and how many new subscribers you have. To understand the level of engagement, you also need to measure the number of likes, comments and shares that your content receives on social media platforms.
You also need to be aware of what type of content is performing well based on your audience’s reaction. It may take some time, but once you have a good understanding of what works best for your business, you can create more effective organic marketing campaigns in the future.
Content is hard too
It takes a lot of effort to create great content. You have to come up with ideas, write them down and then publish them online. It can take hours just to write one blog post or social media update. The good news is that there are some ways to speed up the process.
You can accelerate content development by using new tools like Canva or Grammarly, you can create amazing graphics and posts in a fraction of the time it would take to do it manually. AI is getting better too. Copywriting generators like CopyAI or the Hemingway app allows you to generate fresh ideas, augment existing content, make real-time edits and make it more readable.
Basically organic marketing techniques are better for your business and better for the world. Even if organic is harder to do, they’re still cheaper, easier and more effective than advertising, and they can help you reach new customers without interrupting anyone else.
I’m passionate about helping people build great and innovative products. We’ve taken on the communication challenges of startups, entrepreneurs, B2B software companies and organizations working with university researchers. Visit us at signetscience.com to learn more.
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