Organic content marketing can make or break your business. Whether you like it or not, your business can only be as strong as the marketing backing it up.
Every email, each page on your website, and all social media posts are content marketing, the largest portion of your marketing campaign is, inevitably, content marketing. Organic content marketing is the way your business can drive traffic without direct or indirect advertising efforts.
Your marketing efforts can spread your brand awareness, increase reach, build trust between your customers and your business, and so much more. Isn’t it worth taking each piece of content seriously then?
This guide will help you learn to take control of your content marketing and then use it to drive traffic to your website or app.
What Is Organic Content Marketing?
Content marketing, and specifically organic content marketing, has the goal of bringing users to your website and to then incentivize them to pay for your business without the use of paid advertising.
Effective content marketing is a long-term strategy to build up brand identity and awareness over time, creating a snowball effect of greater and greater lead generation. It is a method of establishing your business (and yourself) as an authority and influencer in your industry.
The primary methods of effective content marketing are usually accomplished through a combination of the following:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Website copy
Email marketing
Podcasts (if applicable)
Video marketing
Social media engagement
Link building
Mobile optimization & site responsiveness
Why Grow Your Business With Organic Content Marketing?
The obvious conclusion is that paid advertising costs money and organic content marketing does not. While this does mean that paid marketing can have more immediate results and can be analyzed efficiently and easily, it will always require more money put into it in order to generate more leads.
Results have shown that, on average, between 70% and 80% of users tend to ignore paid advertisements and instead trust in organic results from search engines. While you will grab the attention of the rest of that 20%-30% of traffic via ads, you are missing out on a lion’s share of the opportunity to generate leads – more importantly, you are spending money to, apparently, have 70%-80% of your potential customers completely ignore it!
Now, let’s imagine a scenario where you continue your paid advertising while also investing in organic content marketing. You can then begin to grab even more interest and web traffic without spending any extra marketing dollars.
Let’s look at six ways to boost your organic content marketing to grow your business in detail.
6 Organic Content Marketing Strategies
Developing an organic content marketing strategy is the most effective way to begin to get your business noticed online and to build authority in your industry. The best part, though, is that it is affordable and scalable in businesses of all sizes.
While some of these methods do take some specific skills or knowledge to implement, the majority of them simply take a little bit of time and a little bit of effort to begin putting into practice.
Creating evergreen content, optimizing SEO, boosting your social media, deeply engaging with customers, guest post and backlink, and making sure content is mobile-friendly are all fairly simple strategies to thoroughly boost your organic content marketing efforts.
1. Evergreen or Skyscraper Content
Arguably this might be the most complicated strategy because it involves thinking through what content in your industry will stay true regardless of the passage of time. Evergreen content is content like blog posts that can be referred back to no matter what changes may come in the next five, ten, or even fifteen or more years.
As an example, if you are in the children’s book publishing industry and you create a blog post that is about the “Best Children’s Books of 2021,” then that content will only be relevant for a specific period of time. However, if you have done this type of organic content marketing year after year and choose one or two best-of-the-best children’s books year-to-year to create a blog post about the “Best Children’s Books Ever,” then that can create a piece of evergreen content that you can continue to update and add to each year.
This can also sometimes be referred to as skyscraper content, but they are not exactly the same. Skyscraper content is similar to evergreen content, but in reverse. It involves finding organic content that is already doing well and then recreating it and improving on it. There is overlap, but both evergreen and skyscraper content are great strategies for your organic content marketing.
2. SEO Optimization
If you have ever heard of organic content marketing, then you probably immediately think of SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is quite possibly the most important piece of organic content marketing strategy we will discuss. Optimizing your SEO will help you rank higher and higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Practically speaking, optimizing SEO is the process of carefully researching and organizing your content around specific keywords that people are using on search engines, like Google, to find content similar to yours or services similar to what you are offering.
A word of caution, though, it’s important to keep in mind that SEO isn’t only about keywords. It’s also about making your content accessible. Including things like tags, alternate text for images, quick loading speeds, and more are all ways to help people read and engage with your content. Search engines value content that is accessible to more users over content that hasn’t been optimized with users in mind.
3. Bolster Your Social Media Presence With Your Niche In Mind
A good hybridization marketing strategy between paid marketing and organic content marketing is bolstering your social media presence. If you want to reach a wider audience (paid or otherwise), then you need to be present and visible where your customers are. It is more the norm for customers to have multiple social media accounts than not, these days. Meet your customers where they are.
Social media exists to connect people. Your business can either choose to connect with customers or not. The choice seems obvious, doesn’t it?
It is important to note, however, that staying active and posting and interacting often on social media can be time-consuming. If you or an employee doesn’t have time to maintain a steady presence across multiple social media sites, then it is better to focus on one or two.
Another great strategy is to join various groups on social media, participating in discussions, answering questions, and offering insights. You can even choose to add your business page to many groups if you have things set up correctly to more directly associate your content in those groups with your business or brand.
4. Truly Engage With Customers
You may not think of engaging customers as organic content marketing, but it is probably one of the most organic types of marketing you do. An added human touch of customer service and customer care goes a long way to creating a buzz about your business.
Rather than sending emails with the classic “Hi, [First Name],” email content, you ask questions and encourage them to reply back. Then, you, a human being, reply back.
If someone reaches out on social media, then it should be a priority to respond to them. When someone posts a review, positive or negative, your business should respond kindly and appropriately.
A great way to engage customers is to invest in live Q&As via social media or host webinars. These types of events can even double as lead magnets for new customers. Either way, all of these will be ways to invest in word-of-mouth marketing to boost your organic content marketing.
5. Guest Post/Backlink
Writing a guest post can be an organic content marketing strategy that helps with lead generation, adds value to your customers and customers of the other business, and builds your authority in your industry. Typically, you are able to add a backlink either in your guest post directly or in the bio at the end or beginning of the guest post.
These backlinks are a crucial part of your SEO strategy and can help people find more out about you or your business. Connecting with other businesses, especially those within your industry, is a natural way to build yourself up as a person of influence in your industry, too.
One word of caution: double check on where you are guest posting. If the site is completely unrelated to your industry or doesn’t seem reputable, then it could harm you more than help you.
6. Keep Content Mobile-Friendly
If you are reading this in a public place right now, then just look up from your device and see how many people are on their smartphone at this very moment. A lot probably, right? Over 52% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. If your website and your content isn’t looking great on mobile, then you could be losing a good chunk of that 52% simply because they don’t want to deal with how the content looks or functions on their device. That number will only increase over time, too.
Keeping your content mobile-friendly is an easy win for your organic content marketing strategy. Much of the time, making your website load as quickly as possible can go a long way to making the difference between customers shopping around on your site versus going to the next hit on Google.
9 Content Development Steps to Create, Assess, and Curate Content
It may seem difficult to come up with ideas for content to showcase in your organic content marketing strategy. This 9 step process will help you come up with ideas, assess the effectiveness of the content, and find creative ways to curate content quicker and easier.
Using this content development plan we have seen millions of dollars in revenue for all kinds of businesses. Using each step in the process will help you come up with great content consistently:
Content Discovery – Having an understanding of your brand story and brand voice is critical to discovering content ideas. Through consultation, keyword research, link building campaigns, email marketing, social media, etc. you can find the types of content that resonate with your brand and with your audience.
Content Identification – In this step, if you don’t already have a clearly defined brand voice, then now is the time to do it. If you have already identified your brand voice, then it is time to pick out some of the themes and topics from the content discovery step. Keep in mind, this step can include web copy, landing page content, email/newsletter content, social media, and more.
Content Research – Now that you have a brand voice and some topics and themes to work on, it is time to do some homework. In-depth research to ensure all content ideas are factually accurate, competent, complete, and connects with your audience is vital for your content development.
Content Creation – This is the step where you start creating content. SEO Optimization and story-driven content will need to be balanced. Your goal is to create engaging content that can also rank well in search engines. Images, audio, video, or even interactive elements within your content will go a long way to creating dynamic, powerful content that keeps people coming back.
Content Review – Before hitting publish, you will always want to make sure it goes through a review process. Make sure it accurately reflects your brand, connects with your audience, and is optimized for SEO. This is a great time to check that all of your links work, your audio and video are loading properly, and that your images are optimized sufficiently.
Content Publishing – Now, it is time to hit “publish!” After working through this process up to this point you should have a solid piece of content to feed into your organic content marketing that adds value to your audience while clearly communicating your brand.
Content Promotion – For each piece of content you create, you will need to promote it across all your social platforms, link it in your email marketing, and even create advertisements if applicable. You are looking for as large a reach as possible.
Content Analytics – Once your content has floated around for a little while, you are going to want to start assessing the analytics. Are people engaging with the content? Is it bringing in any clients? How do customers feel about the content? Is the user reading and watching everything or scrolling away? Now is the time to look for any areas of possible adjustments or changes.
Content Improvements – Follow the feedback from the analytics. Adjust as possible. Tweak as needed. Pivot when necessary. If you are starting to feel totally comfortable with your process, then that may be a sign you aren’t following the data closely. There is no such thing as perfect content, which means you will always have room to grow and reach more clients and customers!
Where to Find Guaranteed Content Ideas
If all else fails, there is one place you can count on for content ideas: customer questions.
Have your team keep track of every question potential and current customers ask, as best as they can. Keep all of these ideas in a file for your organic content marketing team. When you are struggling to find or looking for the next great piece of content, pull one of these questions and answer it, add to it, and bring value to customers before they even realize they have a question to ask.
Then, you can create a FAQ page with links to all of these content pieces. If you already have a FAQ page, then make sure you have a piece of content to address each one of the questions.
Your current and potential customers are already looking for answers. All you need to do is pay attention and create dynamic content for all of these questions.
Content Creation Tools for Organic Content Marketing
Finding the right tools for the job can be hard, so we have gathered a list of some of our favorites to help get you started:
3 Step Process for Effective Content Marketing
A simple content marketing process that has generated millions and millions of dollars for brands in all niches, is what we like to call the Catalyst Content Formula. It involves 3 simple steps. Every brand can benefit from using this process no matter the stage you’re in.
Pillar Content
Pillar content is the type of high-quality, long-form content that you will use as a springboard for other pieces and types of content. This is the content you will use to create Micro Content. Each piece of Pillar Content will have the ability to link to dozens and dozens of Micro Content pieces as well as have other pieces of content link back to the Pillar Content.
Micro Content
Micro Content can come in the form of spin-off blog posts from the Pillar Content, but it can also be in the form of guest posts, videos, or even podcast/podcast episodes. From one piece of Pillar Content you should be looking to get around 10-50 pieces of Micro Content.
Social Content
Social Content is, of course, the content that gets shared on platforms like: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Medium, Quora, Website, Email List, etc. The Social Content will come directly from the Micro Content, breaking down a concept from within the Micro Content.
If you’re interested in effective content marketing, learn more about our free content resources and content marketing services.
Looking For Extra Help On Building Your Organic Content Marketing Strategy?
What did we miss? How many of these organic content marketing strategies are you already implementing? How can we help you boost your business growth with organic content marketing? We would love to hear your thoughts and offer any tips or advice as we are able.
At Catalyst Brand Group we focus on implementing proven growth strategies in brand, platform, and growth that will help your business grow by 2x-3x per year. If you are looking for help with organic content or looking for help in other areas of your business, then Contact Us to start a conversation about how we can help.