Driving organic growth: Growing your customer base without spending money.
Organic growth is the term used to describe increasing your customer base without spending money on marketing or ads. There are several different variables to successfully driving organic growth, and I will break each of them down in this blog. The key variables I will outline are as follows:
Finding your keywords
Being consistent and informative
What to post
How to streamline organic content
The first thing to keep in mind is your SEO keywords. While SEO is a separate thing within itself, it plays one of the largest roles in achieving organic growth. Knowing what words and phrases your customers or potential customers are searching for when trying to find your product/service is essential to making your business easier to find. Now you can find these keywords and place them all over your site, but that within itself will not drive larger growth.
The key to implementing keywords is to make sure they flow well with the rest of your content and overall message. Jamming keywords into your content will only make it appear unprofessional and unappealing to the reader. No one wants to read the word “marketing” 100+ time on one page. The best way to implement keywords is by writing out what you want to say, be informative, produce quality content, then go back through and replace words or phrases with keywords that fit.
The next key to driving organic growth is being consistent and informative. If you keep these two things in mind, your content will be that much better and that much easier to find. Consistency refers to the message of your content as well as how often you are posting. I’ve met people that shoot for once a week, and I’ve met people that follow a strict daily schedule. This part really depends on your product and your audience, but I personally shoot for every other day. I try to emphasize the importance of quality over quantity, but if you’re posting everyday then I suppose you have some room for some unrelated content every now and then.
Being informative is the best way to produce quality content, build trust with your audience, and express your knowledge. Take this blog for example. I write a blog post once a ~ week ~ to illustrate my knowledge and experience in my field. This increases my reliability and makes me easier to find when people are searching for things such as “how to increase organic growth.” The quality of my content, both information and keywords, make it easier to find, and the consistency allows my brand and website to have several different opportunities to appear as a search result.
The next huge task to overcome is what to post. Not every post has to be (nor should be) about promoting yourself. Your content should reflect the interests of your audience and of your community. Remain relevant, be informative, and avoid selling yourself. People do not get on social media to be sold to, but finding helpful information can be very persuasive in building brand loyalty. I post things from “clever” taglines, to aesthetically-pleasing imagery, to helpful advice, to informative videos. I always end each post with a call to action to check out dmdigital.org for more info.
Lastly, streamlining your organic content will help promote larger organic growth. What I mean by this is, all of your content should be consistent in messaging, all your digital profiles should be linked to one another, and your content should appear similar on every channel. Your website should appear on your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google MyBusiness, Yelp, and whatever other platform you may use. The content itself should all share similar traits and consistent messaging. You should link every one of your social media profiles to your website and provide valuable information on every webpage. Consistency is key here.
Lastly, keep in mind that the more often your website link appears somewhere else on the internet (called a “backlink”), the more likely you are to appear as search result organically. This should impress you to try and find ways to get your website URL to appear on other business’ websites. For me, I link every one of my clients websites on mine, and my clients do the same for me. The better quality and more traffic those website receive, the better chances I have to increase my organic traffic (and vice versa).
Increasing your organic growth takes a lot of time and effort, but if you stick with it you will begin to see very promising results. In the meantime, your organic content can serve as a free test of messaging ideas for potential ads.
