What is Organic Marketing?

In a recent Squarespace survey, entrepreneurs across business stages and age groups named attracting new customers as a top business challenge. If you’re considering how you can reach new audiences at a lower cost, one strategy you can consider is organic marketing. This is an accessible method of reaching new audiences that’s a good way to build your brand’s presence without breaking the bank.

Read on to find out how an organic marketing strategy can work for you and how to customize a strategy to your needs.

Defining organic marketing

Organic marketing refers to any marketing activities for your business that are free and don’t include paid promotion. This covers marketing efforts and strategies you create independently rather than relying on third-party services like paid advertisements, online ads, a marketing agency, or PR services.

Examples of organic marketing

Popular organic marketing methods traditionally cover digital marketing and producing content online. This is also known as content marketing. Here you might use search engine optimization (SEO), high-quality social, video, or blog content, and thought leadership articles to draw your audience to your website. But organic marketing can also include activities in the physical space, such as live events.

The organic marketing channels you use may look different depending on your business and what you offer to customers. Here are some examples.

Website content 

Content types: Blog posts, articles, and SEO

Benefits: Quality website content helps establish you as a thought leader in your industry, as well as improving search rankings and driving inbound leads.

Most beneficial for: All business and website types, but especially topic experts or local business owners

Digital communications

Content types: Email marketing, email drip campaigns, newsletters, and SMS notifications

Benefits: Direct marketing like email campaigns, notifications, and newsletters encourage return visits to your site, help build a loyal following, and nurture warm leads who are interested in buying your products.

Most beneficial for: Small businesses and content creators

Social media

Content types: Videos, static images, live videos, and engagement (replying, messaging customers)

Benefits: Social media marketing is a great way to curate your brand identity and grow your community. Its perks include low barrier to entry, as well as possibility for high engagement—hashtags, trending posts, and engaging content can quickly boost your brand to new audiences.

Most beneficial for: Content creators, creatives, service providers or coaches, and physical goods sellers

Live events and sessions

Content types: In-person events, webinars, and podcast appearances

Benefits: This channel puts a face or voice to your business. Live events and sessions like classes, retreats, or workshops allow customers to build a relationship with your brand and to feel involved with the faces and people behind your products.

Most beneficial for: Content creators, creatives, service providers or coaches, and physical goods sellers

Testimonials and user-generated content

Content types: Reviews, word of mouth, and user-generated content (UGC)

Benefits: Authentic reviews and content coming from existing members of your community give your business a valuable seal of authority. Sharing positive feedback, like reviews, testimonials or customer posts, is a great way to encourage new audiences to support your brand. 

Most beneficial for: Services providers or coaches, physical goods sellers

Organic marketing vs. paid marketing

Organic marketing covers anything outside of paid advertisement and strategies. The difference isn’t necessarily in what’s created, but the marketing tools that you use to get in front of your audience. Paid marketing may rely on third parties, such as social media management companies, a PR agency, paid marketing support, or purchasing digital ads. You can create a social media post or website page and get views and traffic through organic marketing, but also pay for ads that promote the same post or page.

As paid marketing comes out of your business expenses, it’s often best if you’re more advanced in your marketing plans and know what channels and demographics to focus on. If you’re a business owner or content creator who’s just starting out or looking to cut costs, organic marketing is a more cost-effective way of starting.

Learn more about paid marketing strategies

What are the benefits of organic marketing?

In the early stages of your business, organic marketing is a way to build up your audience without spending money on advertising. Organic marketing methods are often highly effective at building long-term trust and relationships with your audience, so a great way to generate a loyal customer base over time.

Remember, you don’t have to use organic marketing on its own. You can use this as a way to see which marketing channels work well with your audience before incorporating paid efforts. Organic marketing channels can also supplement other paid marketing activities should you add them to your marketing strategy down the line.

7 steps to build an organic marketing strategy

No matter what type of business you run, you can create an organic marketing strategy that works for you. Here’s how to develop a strategy and more ways to take advantage of different marketing channels, depending on what fits your situation.

1. Know your audience and competition

Knowing your audience is an essential element of your marketing strategy. Try doing audience and competitor research before launching any campaigns. This can help identify what channels will be most relevant to your customers as well as what strategies are popular with your competition.

For example, a business selling perfume could research the most popular social media channels used by their target demographic to outline where best to promote their products. This could be accompanied with a competitor analysis of other perfume brands on the market, looking at common strategies in marketing to customers.

Read our guide to doing competitor research

2. Make a plan

Once you understand your audience and competitors, it’s time to make a plan. Choose the methods and channels that will make up your marketing strategy. It can be helpful to include specific timelines and objectives in planning stages so you can monitor progress as time goes on.

If you’re a business that offers accounting services, you may plan to concentrate your efforts on increasing your presence on social media like LinkedIn. An actionable plan would be growing social media following on the platform by 25% over the next 6 months with the use of regular posts and engaging written content. You could use any of the methods below to work toward your goal.

Follow our guide to setting clear business goals

3. Build out your website content

Build a blog on your website and upload regular posts covering topics and themes relevant to your audience. You can optimize this for SEO using relevant keywords, ensuring your content is engaging, well-researched, and high quality to attract readers. Optimize your web pages by including keywords in page titles and descriptions and keeping designs user-friendly.

If you’re a business that sells greeting cards, you might consider running a series of weekly blog posts on the best cards to purchase for major holidays, incorporating keywords throughout. Or keep it simple with general updates about you and your business, which will naturally touch on keywords and help you engage site visitors.

4. Send out digital communications 

A regular newsletter or email promotion is a great way to market to subscribers and customers. Consider relevant news you can bring to your subscribers, like a monthly promotion, roundup of bestsellers, or other exclusives.

A business selling knitted goods could send out subscriber-only discounts, such as a 30% off sale for holiday-themed clothing in November and December. Or you could include a peek at how a product gets made in a newsletter, summarizing in the message and linking to a longer blog post on your site.

5. Advertise your brand on social media

One of the most popular ways for brands to market is through social media. Social media accounts can connect you with new audiences through posting relatable and engaging content and replying to customers directly on your channels.

A marketing agency might use platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn to post day-in-the-life videos of how they work with clients, or informative videos on how their company got started. Creatives and service providers can share their work and expertise, and ecommerce businesses and show off their products and make them shoppable from each platform.

6. Host live events and sessions for audiences local to you

Live events bring your brand offline and into the real world, which can be a great way to meet your customers and build trust in your business. Even if your brand mainly operates in digital spaces, there are ways to harness this, too—digital audiences can be captured through online webinars, podcasts, classes.

A makeup company could host makeup classes in their city to show customers how to apply and use their products. This could include in-person sign ups to other marketing channels, like email or SMS communications, on top of having products available for purchase. A wellness coach might host a retreat or online workshop, or pitch themselves as a guest on a mindfulness podcast.

7. Share testimonials and use UGC

Testimonials are a valuable seal of approval from existing customers. Encourage buyers to write reviews on products or your local business profiles or ask clients for feedback to display on your website. You can automate these requests in email communications or by asking relevant content creators to share their views on your products.

For example, a brand selling vintage gaming software could reshare content from an influencer talking about their products. A hair stylist could highlight client testimonials alongside before and after photos.

Pros and cons of organic marketing

It’s important to consider the pros and cons of taking these strategies onboard before you get started. Organic marketing is ideal for affordable, long-term growth, but that means it can take time to net bigger successes.

Pros of organic marketing

• Low startup costs: One of the biggest pros of organic marketing is that it doesn't require financial investment to start. If you’re a smaller company or creator looking to market your business, it’s a free, easy starting place.

• Long-term growth: The purpose is to build deeper relationships and trust with your audience over time. And unlike paid marketing, which pauses when you stop your spend, organic marketing materials are evergreen.

• Deeper trust: When building relationships with customers, it’s important to make your marketing efforts feel authentic. Organic marketing channels often allow you to tell your story in ways that feel honest to customers. 

Cons of organic marketing

• Slower results: Organic marketing strategies require time and effort to be effective. While paid marketing channels can often reach larger audiences in less time, it may be more challenging to scale organic marketing projects, such as SEO, quickly. 

• Requires content resources: With certain channels, you’ll need to create new content consistently to see results, which requires planning and production time.

• Data measurement challenges: With paid marketing, you can directly tie a sales increase or follower count to ad spend or work by a marketing agency. But it can be harder to tie your own marketing directly to results. You’ll need to observe trends to identify which channels are most effective overall.