Are you looking to grow your marketing organically?
9 little-known ways to grow your marketing organically
1. Stoke your audience’s curiosity
I know you’ve heard the all-time famous quote Content is king so many times that it probably lost its meaning.
Do you know who the author of this quote is?
It is Bill Gates who, in a 1996 essay, describes the future of the Internet as a marketplace for content.
Back then, Content is king was referring to websites having quality content in order to attract and retain customers.
Today, the quote has been expanded to include all content produced by a brand and published on the website, social media platforms, emails etc.
And the quote is ever more true: content is the engine that powers your marketing efforts.
Do you want more followers?
Content will get them for you.
Do you want to increase your engagement rate?
Content will help you achieve this.
Do you want more leads?
Content will attract more leads for your brand.
But the quote is incomplete because not any content supports your marketing efforts, it should be updated as follows:
Relevant content to your audience is king.
What does relevant content mean?
Relevant content means content that meets these 3 criteria:
- It helps your audience get better at their jobs;
- It exceeds your audience’s expectations;
- It stokes the curiosity of your followers.
How to write relevant content?
First of all, you need to have an in-depth knowledge of your customer’s profile or buyer persona.
What are their challenges, pain points, goals and aspirations? Write them down.
Then you need to know what your brand is about: products, services, mission, brand values and vision.
How can your brand help your buyer persona overcome their challenges, solve their pain points or support them achieve their goals? Through your products and services. Your website copy should communicate this clearly and concisely.
How about on social media?
What type of content helps your followers in their job or surprises and awes them?
The goal of all content on social media is to position your brand as the most valuable resource for your followers’ needs.
To help them get better at their jobs, curate lists of digital tools, apps or platforms.
To help them achieve their goals and aspirations, write how-to content, tips & tricks.
To make them go I didn’t know that, how interesting!, approach a specific topic from your brand’s point of view, a point of view which reflects your brand’s mission and values.
The keyword here is the point of view. There may be thousands of pieces of content on a specific topic, but your brand’s point of view on this topic is unique therefore fresh and interesting.
Here’s an example.
Let’s take three different brands (Dove, Xiaomi, H&M) looking to target women aged 25-35 going on vacation. Dove would produce content on skincare recommendations for travel, Xiaomi would produce content on how to use Xiaomi smartphones to take the best holiday pictures and H&M would produce content on travelling attire that is both comfortable, multifunctional and stylish. And there you have it: three different points of view on the same subject.
2. Boost your brand awareness by creating campaigns for International Days
There are 365 days in a year and every day has been recognized as an international dedication or international anniversary to observe issues of international interest, concern or awareness.
There are the famous and popular international days (International Labour Day or Mother’s Day), then there are international days created to drive awareness to public health concerns (World Multiple Sclerosis Day, World AIDS Vaccine Day) and then there are the weird and funny international days that are not as widely recognized as the rest (Bike-to-work Day, World Redhead Day).
Choose the days that are aligned with your brand’s values, mission and vision. Mark them on your yearly marketing calendar and prepare content to celebrate them from your brand’s point of view.
Here’s an example:
To celebrate World Earth Day, we produced a piece of video content that listed five brands taking steps to minimize their impact on the environment: Lego, BMW, Starbucks, Nike and Amazon.
3. Use the pull marketing strategy
Lead generation is the process of attracting prospects who show interest in your brand’s products and services.
The best way to generate leads is through inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that is focused on attracting customers through relevant and helpful content and adding value at every stage in your customer’s buying journey.
If your company is using leaflets, catalogues, outdoor billboards, media, print and digital advertising or cold calling, then your company uses outbound marketing to generate leads, also known as the push marketing strategy.
The company using inbound marketing draws in and influences its prospects. It wins them over with strategies that help the company build trust and position itself as the authority of its field. And it’s easier for the respective company to generate leads and turn them into customers: they already know its products or services. This company is using the pull marketing strategy.
Why should you use inbound marketing?
Here are the main benefits:
- The cost/lead is 61% less than cost/lead generated through outbound marketing;
- It takes between 4 to 6 months for an inbound marketing strategy to bring results;
- It’s easier for your company to close the leads because they are warmer than the leads generated through outbound marketing.
4. Empower your email subscribers
Email marketing done right outperforms social media in terms of reach, CTR, conversion rate and ROI.
And by outperforming ROI I mean 42:1 which means for every dollar spent, your company’s return is 42 dollars.
To get this high of an ROI, you need to focus on the words done right.
First, go back to your customer persona file and update it with the latest behaviour changes. Be very specific on what your customers need to meet their goals and outline how your brand will help them.
Of course, your email marketing strategy should include sales-focused emails, but maintain a balance between sales content and empowering content.
If you don’t know what that balance is, you can start with the 80-20 rule of thumb: 20% sales content and 80% empowering content.
Once you have identified what empowering content looks like for your customers, invest your resources into designing the ways in which to deliver that content: infographics, video, expert quotes, listicles, how-tos, links to in-depth articles etc.
Find a way in line with your brand goals to reward your most engaged subscribers.
Also, create the opportunity for your subscribers to get to know each other. The end objective of your email marketing strategy is to empower your subscribers individually and transform them into a community.
One of this year’s top acquisitions is HubSpot buying The Hustle, a media company whose newsletter reaches over 1.5 million subscribers each day with the latest tech and business news.
Why did HubSpot, a full platform of marketing, sales, customer service, and CRM software and one of the largest marketing and sales content producers buy a media company?
Here’s what they said:
Today, B2B brands can be a daily part of their customers’ lives before they even use their product. They can become a daily source of education and information for their customers. They can grow a large audience for that content by creating it for the people who buy their product and the many more who will use it. They can earn the attention of their audience by continually creating value for them.
5. Leverage the power of cultural events
Game of Thrones is one of HBO’s greatest hits with record-breaking viewership worldwide. The series spanned over a decade and quickly became a cultural phenomenon creating a host of memes, gifs, quotes and so on.
There are many blog articles highlighting valuable lessons on leadership and personal growth and development from the beloved TV series.
When the last episode of Game of Thrones aired in 2019, every social media platform was abuzz with millions of pieces of content focused on the series.
A successful marketer stays up to date on what’s happening on the global and local cultural landscape and if the said cultural event is aligned with the brand’s mission and values, produces valuable content for the brand’s customers from a unique perspective.
To date, the biggest cultural event of 2021 is Friends: The Reunion, a 99-min special where the cast of the 90s popular show Friends come together for the first time in 17 years.
HBO has revealed that the special has crossed 1 million views on the platform. Young and old fans of the show took to social media to show their love and appreciation.
On Instagram #friendstvshow alone has 1 million posts.
Are your customers fans of Friends? Can your brand create Friends-focused content for them?
6. Keep your followers engaged
Writing content on a specific topic in the form of a series provides many benefits for your audience and your brand.
The content series helps your brand stay top of mind with its audience and the audience learns what to expect from this type of content.
If the content is relevant and interesting, you have a winner because it helps the marketer achieve one of the most important goals in marketing: to influence behaviour.
7. Landing pages with downloadable content
Another way to grow your marketing organically is to deliver content in a downloadable format.
Rewrite, redesign and pack your best content as a PDF file.
Give the bundle pack in exchange for your customer’s email and voila!, you’ve set up shop on their PC or mobile.
Having your content saved is a great way to boost brand awareness, establish yourself as a valuable resource and remain top-of-mind.
8. Use the latest features from social media
The main goal of any social media platform is to keep its users engaged for longer periods of time.
To achieve this goal, all social media companies keep innovating and creating new features and tools.
Apart from the obvious benefit of using them as a brand (new ways to engage with your followers), these new features come with a second advantage: the company boosts them to increase usage rate and popularity.
Why not give them a run for their money?
9. Polls in groups
Groups are a great tool for every marketer looking to increase brand awareness organically.
I found conducting polls in Facebook and LinkedIn Groups especially useful.
All you have to do is select the questions carefully.
Find topics that are of interest to both your brand and your group members (questions about products and services), but also try to ask questions that help you understand more about their challenges, their pain points and what they expect from your brand.
Once you have enough relevant answers, you now know what content to post in groups.
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