Master Organic Digital Marketing for Sustainable Business Growth

By Kristi Mitchell

Introduction: The Case for Organic Digital Marketing

In today's digital environment, businesses (and buyers) are bombarded with countless marketing messages every day, making it incredibly challenging to stand out. Organic digital marketing emphasizes creating authentic, problem-solving content to capture the attention of your target audience. This type of marketing can be especially helpful for small to medium-sized service-based businesses, who often have limited marketing budgets.

Decoding the Marketing Funnel

The marketing funnel is an essential framework that helps businesses think through the journey a prospective customer takes from awareness to purchase. The marketing funnel includes four fundamental stages: Attract, Convert, Nurture, and Close. A focused evaluation of marketing tactics at each funnel stage is crucial to help ensure there’s an overarching strategic marketing plan to attract and convert ideal clients. A common pitfall for many businesses is the conversion phase, where prospects turn into leads. Without having a way to capture names and email addresses of prospective clients, a business is unable to effectively keep in touch with those people and will ultimately miss out on the opportunity to close many potential sales. 

Finding Appropriate Awareness Tactics

The Attract (or awareness) stage of the marketing funnel is the first step to connecting with prospects, and typically most marketing efforts are geared toward this area. Initiatives like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), speaking engagements, social media, and podcasts are all ways that a business can connect with new potential clients. Given that there are so many ways a business can get in front of new audiences, it’s important to find and select tactics that work well for each individual business. Factors like target audience and resources available (in terms of time, budget, and expertise) can help guide the decision making process in selecting the best tactics for your business.

The Strategic Use of Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are an effective conversion tactic, as they’re designed to gather valuable consumer data in exchange for relevant content. Lead magnets — also referred to as “freebies” or gated content — can come in a variety of formats like ebooks, quizzes, templates, white papers, and webinars. An example of a lead magnet could be a social media guide and template for small business owners who are DIYing their own marketing efforts, or a quiz that helps small businesses identify areas of opportunity within their own marketing efforts. The key to creating an effective lead magnet is making sure that what you’re creating solves a problem for your target audience. You want to provide them with a valuable resource that they feel excited to use.

Building Trust Through Nurture Tactics

In the world of marketing, we often hear about establishing the Know, Like, and Trust factors. Effective nurturing is how a business stays in touch over time and builds trust with their potential customers, which is a critical piece — especially for service-based businesses. Typically, nurturing can be accomplished through social media (consistent posting and engaging, as well as sending direct messages), email marketing, and 1:1 communication. Consistency is key when it comes to effectively nurturing your audience. Creating and sharing your content on a consistent schedule allows you to stay in touch with your audience and keep your business top of mind, again and again — increasing the likelihood of a sale.

Marketing Collateral to Support Sales Processes

The lines between marketing and sales can often get blurred. When looking at a Marketing Funnel for a business, closing the deal at the bottom of the funnel is the last step. While there are many sales strategies and tactics that need to be employed to successfully close new business, there are many ways that strategic marketing can assist in this process. Testimonials help build credibility and speak to a company’s reputation. They are a great way to help potential clients see what it might be like to work with a business, and can be used strategically throughout a website on sales pages and included in email marketing and social media posts. In addition, case studies are a very valuable marketing tool that helps enable sales as well. Having case studies available on your website and sharing them through emails during the sales process can help build the trust needed for someone to commit to working with you.

Building a Robust Foundation Before Paid Marketing

It’s incredibly important to solidify an organic marketing foundation before investing in paid advertising. Paid ads are typically geared toward reaching more people with your message — filling the top of the funnel. When you don’t have a strategic plan in place to capture those people (through a lead magnet) and nurture them over time (through email marketing), your ability to convert leads into clients is greatly diminished. Many businesses waste a lot of marketing dollars on paid advertising because they lacked the strategic organic marketing foundation necessary to successfully move prospects through their pipeline. Businesses who invest in the overarching strategic marketing plan first are better set up to amplify their efforts through paid advertising, and realize more favorable results.

Consistency and Value in Marketing Content

The heart of successful organic marketing lies in consistency and real value in the content provided to the audience. Authenticity and practicality are essential in building customer relationships. Creating content that not only attracts but also retains customers by solving their real-world problems is the best way to build a solid organic marketing foundation.

Using Data to Refine Your Marketing Efforts

There are many opportunities to use data to help inform your marketing efforts. Google Analytics can give you insights into where your website traffic is coming from and how users are engaging on your website. This allows you to evaluate where you may want to invest more or less in your marketing efforts. If, for example, a specific tactic isn’t driving website traffic or the users are coming to and leaving your site right away, it may not be a channel that you want to continue investing in. On the email marketing side of things, looking at your open rates can tell you how healthy your email list is and how good your subject lines are performing. Click rates can tell you how engaging and enticing your email content is for the recipient. Social media data, such as impressions and engagement, can help guide your future content creation efforts. Posts that get more engagement and visibility should be monitored and replicated or repurposed in the future.

Essential Need for Continuous Learning

Digital marketing is a dynamic field that evolves constantly with technological advancements and changing consumer behaviors. Oftentimes for small and midsize companies, it’s not realistic for someone internally to stay on top of the latest marketing trends and tools, so it’s more beneficial to outsource these efforts to contractors and Fractional CMOs. It’s essential for marketers to remain agile learners, adapting to new tools and techniques to stay competitive and achieve great results for companies. 

Conclusion: Reflect, Adapt, and Engage

Taking time to reflect on your current marketing strategies and tactics is a great first step. Data can be a great source of information to help inform future efforts, and getting back to the basics of a strategic content plan can set you up for much better results in the future.