You often hear the debate between paid advertising and organic content marketing. Which option is better? Which option brings in better sales? Which provides more sustainable results?

Anyone who’s done paid marketing and advertising can tell you it brings in a burst of traffic and a spike in sales. It’s a great strategy and tool to boost your monthly margins or push for a firesale. Yet, businesses who continuously rely on paid advertising find themselves in a pickle months later. That’s why most successful brands aim for longevity and sustainability with their brand and audience.

Having a heavy dependence on paid advertising can be dangerous to any business looking to build lasting value in their industry. Sure, it’s great to give yourself a boost in the market. But it’s also like going to the grocery on a hungry stomach.

Spending resources – especially when you don’t have much to spend – for instant gratification is a common mistake for many Caribbean businesses. While it’s a sure-fire way to get elevated click-rates and high traffic, it’s always followed by the dive back to normalcy – often lower engagement rates and conversions. And that’s not where you’d prefer to be in the long-term if you’re wanting to build brand value and sustained growth.

The difference between paid and organic content marketing generally comes down to your goals – your business goals. If you’re looking to get long-term sustainable sales, build a brand and create loyal followers, then splashing the cash to get dopamine-infused results isn’t the answer.

Organic content marketing strategies have proved to be more impactful on brands and businesses in the long-term. Consider Hubspot – an innovator in the content marketing space. Their pioneering approach to marketing using consistent content generation brought in $15 Million USD in 5 years, along with 3,855 loyal customers.

Even the Marketing Helpline has highlighted in an article that 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing and 24% are planning on increasing their investment this year. These statistics underscore how powerful most global marketers believe content marketing truly is.

Organic content creation provides customers with natural, authentic and value-based information. It’s a strategy to help your audience and potential customers find your business through social media, search engines and blogs. It’s focused on educating clients, making them feel a part of your brand, and helps you build and share authority. And the main sauce to make organic content marketing work is consistency.

But this is just the foundation. If you’re wanting to take an organic approach to generate real customer value, brand building and continuous sales, here are 4 actions you can immediately take to get you started.

 

 

 

1. Focus on educational or valuable content, not just sales

 

One key area to focus on is creating educational and valuable content for your audience. Building a good organic track record for your marketing is hinged on what your customer finds valuable. These usually come in the form of videos, case studies, how-to guides or webinar tutorials to name a few. They are pieces of content your audience can’t find elsewhere.

But it’s not enough to create 1 or 2 pieces of content well. You have to create monthly, weekly, even daily content that resonates with your audience.

A good way to get started is by asking yourself some difficult questions about your business and audience.

  • How much do you spend on paid advertising?
  • How much cash and clients does paid advertising bring in?
  • What is your long-term goal for the company?
  • What interests your customer enough for them to read, listen or watch what you put out?
  • How do you continue to create that type of value or educational content? And within budget?

These questions unlock opportunities. Not only to stop giving all your money to Google, Facebook and Instagram, but to build a brand and business independent of them all.

Whether you’re looking to create written, video, audio or image content for your audience, finding the right information they need to make them better in their daily lives opens the door to their hearts.

 

2. Include SEO and keywords for website, video, articles and social media

 

Paid is great… if you have the cash to splash consistently. But if you’re wanting your worth in content marketing gold, using keywords and having experience in SEO is the way to go. Why? Because organic content marketing uses SEO-friendly keyword-centric strategies can yield up to 571% more in traffic and potential sales. This is why we believe in organic content marketing more than most.

So how do you get more SEO-friendly and keyword centric?

One way is to focus your keywords on your audience using natural language. With Google’s improvements to their search engine platform, think about focusing your content and copy using language your audience uses to find answers. We use the E-A-T-S approach to make sure all our clients are aligned with Google’s ever-changing algorithm.

Being able to understand your audience and find keywords they often use gives your audience a better chance of connecting with you.

Keep in mind that not every content piece is created to equally generate the same number of traffic. But what this SEO and E-A-T-S focus would do is help you create a sustainable content marketing plan. One where you continue to address your ideal customer’s needs, wants and questions in a way they need or want. Not to mention, providing heavier hitting pieces of content they can constantly refer to, like this beginner’s guide by Moz.

 

 

3. Back-link to articles, posts and content

 

Another actionable way to improve your organic content marketing is backlinking. A backlink is a link connecting one specific website to another. Moz highlights the importance of backlinks, stating it as a vote of confidence from one source to another.

It’s a website’s and business’s way to earn credibility and increase their authority online. If you’re wanting to become an expert on a specific topic, using your keywords and content specifically to link to other important sources is ultimately helpful. Ask other websites in the industry to link to your articles, as these other websites can also add to your credibility, pointing to you as a source of valid information.

One key tip to consider is the value or authority level of the website you’re linking to. For a better organic result, leverage higher authority website content to help generate more traffic.

 

 

 

4. Re-purpose your content for multiple goals

 

If you’ve been producing content and have already seen some success applying it to your marketing strategy, we don’t want you to cast it all aside and start from zero. Creating content is already a difficult task. So much so that 60% of B2B marketers consider it their greatest challenge. That’s why many top marketing experts talk about repurposing content.

Repurposing content you’ve already used gives you new opportunities and benefits that creating from scratch won’t give you.

Firstly, you can make the most out of the hard work you’ve previously created. Sure, the initial idea for your content piece may have been to share it to corporate clients through the daily newspaper. But taking that piece of content and repurposing it for Facebook readers, LinkedIn professionals and podcasts – more modern online spaces – can help to draw your audience’s attention in more impactful ways.

Secondly, you can redeem content pieces that were previously unsuccessful. This also gives you the opportunity to find the most worthy pieces to redeem, recreate or repurpose for the best return.

Running a content audit on what your company previously produced will be helpful to your marketing team – from content analysis to see what works and what doesn’t to audience insights resonating with your previous message. You’ll also understand how to optimise future content pieces using bits of the past.

One company that grew its business in the early stages using organic content marketing was Buffer, a social media management platform for businesses. Buffer grew its initial base of 100,000 users per month using a simple strategy – blogging twice a day and publishing content on high visibility websites. Without this strategy, they would not be an office-worthy tool used by hundreds of thousands of marketers and social media experts today.

So if you’re a company thinking about long-term growth, sustainable results and are actually tired of sinking money into the social media pit of Facebook and Instagram, then consider a sound organic content marketing strategy. It’ll help you stand out against the noise and control of tech brands who leverage their own audience and generate more consistent traffic and sales.

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