Organic marketing strategy: grow from 0 followers, and do not use paid ads

Hello friends!

This is Jane Kubryak, and the first issue of my Discover with Jane weekly newsletter.

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Our today’s topic is organic marketing.

If you prefer watching, rather than reading, here is the first video issue of Discover with Jane.

Organic marketing builds trust and reputation - and you do not pay for ads!

Organic search is 1,000% more traffic than organic social.

49% of marketers believe organic search is the most profitable channel they use. 73% of marketers and business owners spend over $1,000 per month on content marketing.

Sounds ideal… But what do we do exactly?

In this post I’ll tell you what organic marketing is, why you should absolutely use it for your business, what its pros and cons are and most importantly — which platforms to use and how to do it to maximize your organic marketing efforts.

What is organic marketing

Organic marketing is a tool helping to naturally attract users and build an audience — without paying for ads. In other words, you don't pay for every click or every subscription. It's about creating valuable content that people want to see and share willingly.

Source: What is Organic Marketing? – The Ultimate Guide

Organic marketing generates traffic to your business over time through blog posts, case studies, guest posts, unpaid tweets, etc. SEO, social media, and a variety of other channels to increase brand awareness — those are the main tools you want to be using when it comes to organic marketing (we will talk about them in the corresponding section).

Why you need organic social for your startup

First, organic search drives 1,000% more traffic than organic socials. Search algorithms are changing, socials are crowded, and you can't rely on one source.

Second, with organic marketing, you can attract visitors to your site and then convert them to paid customers. Besides, organic marketing affects your paid marketing efforts. If someone visits your website organically, you can retarget these people later with paid ads (on your social media, search engines, etc.).

And third, investors love organic growth. Using only paid channels works less and less. And if you show traction without marketing budgets, they start to imagine, what you can do with them!

Opportunity: pros and cons

Source: Organic marketing

What about the strongest points of organic marketing?

1. It helps build trust & rapport.

People tend to trust organic content more than paid advertising. Additionally, by sharing helpful content over time, you develop an emotional connection with your customers, which increases their loyalty and your conversion rate.

2. It is cost-effective.

While not entirely free (content creation costs money), organic marketing is generally (much!) cheaper than paid marketing. But the results of customer acquisition and retention can be just as good as with paid marketing — this is #1 reason why investors in startups love this type of marketing.

3. It brings long-term benefits for your business

It takes time to see results from organic marketing. But this strong reputation that you build over time has a much more solid ground than those one-time cold outreach advertising. You create a solid lead base that constantly engages with your content and promotes your brand by word-of-mouth.

Despite these undoubted pros, organic marketing has disadvantages:

1. It won’t deliver you quick results

As said above, organic marketing takes time and effort to stand out in current floods of data. So, if you need a revenue stream right here & right now, organic marketing is not something to bet on.

2. It has a limited reach

Organic marketing is mainly displayed to your followers and rarely to those who don't know or follow you yet.

3. It’s highly competitive

Competition for organic sources is fierce — it is really difficult to stand out from your competitors.

That's why in the long run, you shouldn't opt for either organic or paid marketing. Instead, combine both and reap the fruits later.

Organic vs. paid marketing

Before you start combining organic & paid marketing, let’s take a closer look at how they differ:

Source: Organic marketing

• Organic marketing focuses on drawing the audience over time, while paid marketing uses chargeable methods to directly target, reach, engage, and convert your leads fast.

• Organic search drives 53% of website traffic, while paid search brings only 27%. Once again: people trust organic results more.

• Organic marketing is usually compared to the word-of-mouth marketing, as it’s more true-to-life and inspires confidence. In its turn, paid marketing is sales-oriented and concentrated on direct actions — ex., making a purchase or attending a webinar.

• Organic marketing aims to attract leads and boost brand awareness — paid marketing helps convert leads from a specific campaign.

Organic traffic platforms

And now, the juiciest part. If you are a startup in 2024 on a limited budget — what can you DO & where to get organic traffic?

Many believe that socials are the main drivers of organic traffic, i.e., Instagram Reels should be the main channel for customer acquisition. But once again: search engines drive 1,000% more traffic than organic socials! Meaning socials are a nice tool to bring engagement and therefore — audience, and therefore — clients. But they are only one channel out of dozens.

If you are starting to grow from 0 followers, you should focus on collaborations. Some of your friends definitely have hundreds, if not thousands of followers. Ask them to tell their subscribers about your new account! Do the same with your coworkers, because your topics are similar.

This scheme will help you not only get from 0 followers to a portion of your friend's number, but also get noticed by algorithms.

Here are the best tools & platforms for organic marketing.

• SEO: Answer peoples’ questions with your content to appear in search results. Make sure to optimize your website and content to rank higher (especially on Google).

• YouTube: A search engine #2. Create videos that in the same manner answer peoples’ questions and can be found on both YouTube and Google search.

• Instagram Reels, TikTok vids & YouTube Shorts: No need to invent a wheel here. Just repurpose your YT videos.

• LinkedIn: You can get free followers by connecting with people manually, and posting in groups.

• Newsletters: Build an email list and send out regular newsletters with valuable content.

• Guest blogging: Write articles for other websites to reach a new audience. Do not set out for Forbes, but a professional publication, or a regional news outlet would gladly accept free content in exchange for bringing views to your profile or website. See my collaboration with Product Marketing Alliance as an example.

• Social media collaborations: Partner with other profiles in your niche to cross-promote your content. LinkedIn & Medium are the best platforms for finding collaborators. Even if you and your collaborator have 200 followers each, you'll likely to get seen by several dozen people - not bad!

Organic marketing is a great initial process to build trust and get initial followers. The point is, it can help you start to grow audience. Once you establish your presence on a platform, you can start using paid marketing alongside organic, or collaborate more actively!

Thank you for reading this newsletter. Please share your feedback in a reply, or DM me on social media. What would you learn next about this topic?

Which topics would you suggest for the next week’s newsletter?

Let’s stay in touch, and until next week!

Best,

Jane