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November 17th, 2014 Before I begin on why the term "organic marketing" causes many a marketer and advertiser to get a serious case of the heebie jeebies, we should start by defining the term; Organic marketing on the Internet is defined as attracting visitors based on the value of the content to the visitor. This means no "hard sell, no keyword spamming (though intelligent use of keywords in natural English is always A Good Thing), no giveaways, coupons, contests or freebies. In other words: Organic marketing is about providing valuable and useful information to your target market without asking for or expecting an immediate sale as a result. It is about building credibility and trust with the viewer for not just your brand, but the fact that you truly are an expert in the industry in which you operate. So why does this give some people the willies ? Because there is no call to action. No "Buy now!" link splashed all over the content you are providing. Many think, even if it is on a subconscious level How do we know it's a guarantee? Because of the Internet, that's why. The fundamental change the Internet has made to society as a whole is the fact that anyone can be a publisher - a disseminator of information. This means there are a lot of people out there publishing gigabytes of useful, helpful and/or interesting information simply because they want to. Consumers have gotten used to this massive amount of information being at their fingertips. Take a gardening blog, as an example: If you are an avid home gardener and regularly visit a blog to get the weekly tips on weeding, planting, trimming and what-not and the author happens to mention a product that they use to accomplish that which they are writing about, the regular readers will have a tendancy to want to acquire the same tool to accomplish the same things. If you are the retailer of pruning shears B and the blog author recommends pruning shears A - Guess who didn't just make a sale ? Many businesses run pseudo blogs that are simply laden with product mentions, product photos, customer testimonials about the product - so on and so forth. The irony here is that while I have often been one to recommend marketing to the lowest common denominator amongst the general public - to never assume too high a level of intelligence amongst the masses of people reading your material - Even I recognize that there are few consumers unintelligent enough to realize a blog, as described above, is nothing more than a very wordy commercial - which means the credibility of the information provided is all suspect - After all, all "they" want to do is sell product. I cannot stress enough the importance of the fact that when I say that you, as a business owner on the Internet, are literally competing with the rest of the Internet. It may sound corny, but you need to realize that a consumer, by visiting your site, is doing you a big favour - Because there are thousands upon thousands of other sites they could be visiting - and they will - the femtosecond they realize you are treating them as if they have the intellect of a pebble. Give the consumer value. Give them a reason to come back - often. The consumer comes to the realization all on their own that if you are walking the talk about being an expert in your industry, that the chances are good that the products you are selling are as good as your advice (Which, naturally, behooves to to make darned sure your advice is actually good) Now, with all of the above being said, make sure the advice you are writing about regularly relates to your products. If you are selling high speed cable modems, you don't want to be writing a blog about fuel efficiency in older cars. Keep in mind, too, that your regular writings should be on your own company website - The goal is, after all, to attract new customers - so while you are giving away valuable information free of charge, you do still want the reader to be exposed to your branding, as well as the other options on your website. The means that while the primary content is on your company website, you make a precis or an excerpt to post to places like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc, "teasers", in other words, to lead readers back to your site - in order to be exposed to said branding. Well, no. But with good effort comes good rewards: Organic marketing can often seem like it takes longer than traditional pull and push advertising; The thing of it is that once you've got your core audience, not only do they become paying customers - not only do they become repeat paying customers (which are far, far more valuable than a one-off customer who may come to purchase only a discounted item from an ad you ran in Google Ad Words that was, itself, a loss-leader to begin with), but, even more valuable: They bring in other readers who then start the whole cycle, themselves. And yes, since you are wondering, this article is a piece of organic marketing. This is an effort to provide you value in improving your own marketing efforts, with the plan that you'll look around the rest of the site to see what other gems of wisdom or valuable information I can provide. As it happens, the site on which this is published doesn't actually sell anything to the public: I provide links to Internet Service Providers who sell their services to the public. Of course, every now and then, there is also the company who decides "This Marc guy seems to know what he's talking about - It would be faster and more efficient to have him do some of our marketing projects for us - let's give him a call" Mission accomplished. Copyright © 2020 CanadianISP.ca / Marc Bissonnette, Ontario - All rights reserved - |
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