Wayne Lockwood: Why Organic Marketing Is Here to Stay and How to Add It to Your Strategy

Organic this? Organic that? What’s the big deal with organic? You can have your own opinion about food products, but in marketing, the answer is pretty clear. Organic marketing is the way. But what is organic marketing and how does it differ from paid social marketing?

In this blog, we’ll explore what organic marketing is, what it isn’t, and how you can use it to drive your business.

What Is Organic Social Media Marketing?

Organic social media is the use of the free services and tools that each social media platform provides to its users. The purpose of organic social media is to build a community of loyal followers and customers by posting relevant content and interacting with those who communicate with your brand. Organic social media marketing is the best way to show customers your true values and culture, while also learning about the values of your customers. By utilizing funnel optimization to convert organic traffic into purchases.

Organic social media marketing has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than paid marketing. This is because brands and customers are given the opportunity to learn about one another simultaneously as they interact on social media platforms.

This is done with organic efforts such as answering questions, providing or responding to feedback, or simply starting a conversation about your brand.

What Is Paid Social Media Marketing?

Paid social, meanwhile, is identified as paying for social media platforms to display advertisements or sponsored messages to users of the social network based on user profiles and traits. Each of these sponsored messages/ads is run it incurs a specified cost per trigger or campaign. For example, pay-per-click (PPC) ads incur a cost each time your ad is clicked by a user, while Facebook uses scheduled blast posts.

From this simplistic breakdown, we can begin to see that organic marketing, while requiring time, can lead to more sales and longer lasting customer engagement on social media platforms.

Here are some tried and true methods still relevant today outside of traditional organic social media marketing:

Use Targeting to Attain the Maximum Organic Potential

Within social media, there are a lot of various ways to optimize your targeting organically. While paying for social media marketing can be effective, adjusting the targeting on your posts can boost your organic reach. Within Facebook and Twitter, you can adjust for your posts to target the following criteria: gender, relationship, status, education level, age, location, language, interests, and post end date. With these targeting attributes available, you can better target your audience so the right people can see your content.

Optimize SEO Titles

According to Moz, having a strong SEO title is one of the most important on-page SEO element. Also, it is important to note that title tags should only be around 50-60 characters long and be very relevant to the content on the page.

Posting Evergreen Content

Whether it may be on social media or your blog, it’s important to publish evergreen posts that do not contain an expiration date. These posts should be engaging and stand out for your readers to stay intrigued. If you’re having trouble thinking about what to post, consider content that is educational and fun. Statistics show that users tend to share more positive posts than negative ones.

Use Emojis to Boost Engagement

Emojis have become an accepted part of our online vocabulary and are a good way to spice up your social copy. Emojis are a way to humanize your brand as well as express complex ideas in fewer characters so you can engage more on platforms such as Twitter. They help you capture more attention by conveying the general emotion and ideas around a post even before a person has had a chance to read it.

Choose the Most Engaging #Hashtags

According to data from Buffer, Hashtags affect engagement differently depending on the social network:

Twitter posts with one hashtag generate 21% more engagements than tweets with three or more.
Instagram posts, on the other hand, see the most engagement when using 11+ hashtags.
Facebook posts do better without hashtags.

If you know of a high-profile event coming up, you can prepare in advance to make sure you’re ready to get in on the action. The more targeted, the better. If you’re a fashion brand, for example, consider live-tweeting or covering high profile events and commenting on what celebrities are wearing.

Most events are accompanied by hashtags that you can hop on. But the key to hijacking a hashtag is not to hijack it at all. Instead, you should aim to contribute to the conversation in a meaningful, natural way.

Get Your Meme On

what-is-a-meme

Memes have taken over social media. In addition, you can get a degree these days in “memeology” as it relates to the human psyche.

Memes are cultural behaviors that spread from person to person through imitation. That gives them a natural virality that businesses can use. By playing on nostalgia, humor, and imitation it allows for organic growth through the spread of various iterations of the same meme. This most recently seen in the Nike meme spread throughout all of Facebook after the Colin Kaepernick pickup as an endorsement deal.

Run a Contest/Giveaway

Contests and giveaways tend to produce significant engagement because they ask your audience to do relatively little for the opportunity to reap some reward.

The more compelling your prize, the more hoops people will jump through for the chance to come out on top. These contests can be run directly on social media or facilitated with a tool.

Organic Marketing & the Marketer

In today’s age of competition, dollar bills, and robotic engagement, organic marketing is becoming more and more critical to help you stand out amongst the rest of the competition. By creating an experience for the user, you have a much higher chance to draw in new customers and produce more sales because the rapport has been built in a non-invasive manner. Coupling these activities with paid efforts will lead to more word of mouth organic growth as your paid advertisements are talked about by new customers to already engaged users. These users with positive experiences will relay them and continue this process.

Are there any organic marketing opportunities that have been successful for you? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

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