Organic marketing is a way to steer customers to your website without using paid advertising. Many businesses use paid ads to build brand awareness and drive website visitors. However, an organic content strategy uses blogs, articles, social media, etc., to promote products and engage users.
The main channels for organic promotion are:
- Content building: writing articles, blogs, guides, thought leadership, link magnets, etc.
- Search engine optimization (SEO): Using keywords and user search terms to rank highly on a search engine results page (SERP)
- Social media: Social media content can help businesses connect with and engage an audience, increasing brand awareness and ultimately driving traffic.
- Funnel optimization: A sales funnel outlines a customer's path from first becoming aware of a brand to making a purchase. Optimizing this process can help push your prospects along by fine-tuning each stage.
If you’re on MarketingMiner.com, it’s because you’re interested in using SEO to help your business. Marketing Miner is an excellent source of articles that can help you improve your SEO and achieve higher SERP rankings.
But what about the other components that are used to enhance organic positions and promote your content? Are they part of your organic marketing strategy?
We’ll explain one of these elements in detail below, but let’s first answer the question, “what is content promotion?”
What is content promotion?
Content promotion is a way to get the word out about your product.
Businesses have two options here. They can: hire content promotion agencies to write content or generate the content themselves.
For example, a law firm can use a legal content promotion service that will drive traffic via SEO, social media, and press releases. Instead of finding clients on social media or via referral, they can produce content that targets SEO searches and gives advice.
Additionally, they can use their social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook) to engage with users and position themselves as an authority within their niche.
Organic SEO marketing is the most effective organic promotion channel. But, it works together with the other elements. Businesses can't afford to ignore the other channels if they want to get results.
Today we want to talk about another significant part of organic SEO marketing: content building. In particular, how content relevance can help boost your organic marketing.
Keep on reading if you want to learn how content building can boost your organic traffic, sales, or lead generation.
Organic products - Organic content?
Customer acquisition costs are increasing all the time. Ads are becoming more expensive or producing fewer results. What`s more, acquiring new clients is five times more costly than keeping the existing ones.
Organic digital marketing is continuously growing in popularity — in part because of the increasing cost of acquiring new customers. When done well, it's a low-cost way to drive traffic, sales, and leads.
Google uses a lot of criteria to decide when websites should rank. A prominent aspect of SEO is linking search terms to keywords. However, a Google search engine needs to do a whole lot more.
A good search engine experience for a customer involves:
- Looking for something
- Finding relevant content, answers, businesses, etc.
Google wants its users to feel satisfied with their results. If users are confident with the search engine, they'll return and stay engaged. As a result, Google will sell more ads.
In the past, Google mostly connected users with websites that contained the terms or keywords they had inputted. However, with each update, SERP results have become more sophisticated and relevant to users.
Benefits of an organic digital marketing approach over other content promotions strategies.
One of the big benefits of an organic marketing strategy is that it can cost a lot less than using advertisements. Paid advertisement can come in many forms, like:
- Social media ad
- Native advertising
- Banner advertising
Organic growth marketing is a long-term strategy. It can take Google three to six months to rank content. Building up authority via organic social media marketing is a cumulative approach.
While an organic content strategy takes longer to bear fruit, the effects are long-lasting. A great piece of content can deliver traffic for years, while ads only produce results while you pay for them.
Ranking highly for a search term, then holding that position is the most cost-effective way to drive traffic.
How much does organic content cost?
Unlike ads, organic digital marketing is free. Strategies like organic social media marketing can help reduce the high costs of customer acquisition by leveraging one of your most powerful resources: your knowledge.
Google ranks pages based on their ability to answer questions and provide valuable information. Businesses naturally employ people who deeply understand their niche, and this expertise is a valuable component for companies and users.
Delivering content that users want is an essential part of organic digital marketing. Businesses can combine blogs, thought leadership, how-to articles, and more to satisfy user queries and position their website and brand as an authority in their niche.
However, driving users to your pages is just the beginning. An excellent organic marketing strategy needs to consider how to keep users there and signal to Google that the content is helpful enough to deserve a high ranking.
Why is optimizing content important?
Google uses several algorithms to rank pages. When a user searches a term, Google sorts through billions of pages to provide users with the most helpful, valuable response.
One of the most significant factors that Google and other search engines use is customer experience. Simply put, Google compares what happens when other users with similar search terms have clicked on the page.
A critical element of this process is known as "dwell time." For example, when users input a term, they are served some options on the SERP. When they click on the link, dwell time measures how long they stay on each page.
Pages with a dwell time of a few seconds signal to Google that the user didn't manage to find what they needed. Pages with an extended dwell time, i.e., a few minutes, can suggest the user searched around and was satisfied by what they found.
While this term may seem similar to "bounce rate," they are different things. Bounce rate records users who immediately bounce from the page. Dwell time is recorded once the user has stayed for some time.
Dwell time can be tracked via Google Analytics, particularly by the average session duration measurement.
In essence, Google sees the amount of time that a user stays on a link as a sign that the page has good quality content. So, what can publishers do to make their pages more sticky? To find some solutions, we need to think about procrastination.
Procrastination, meaning delaying or postponing activities or tasks, is a common human behavior. A lot of research has been done on the concept of procrastination. It's a significant problem to solve because it hurts productivity and gets in the way of people achieving their potential.
Why do we procrastinate?
Answering the question "why do we procrastinate" is complicated. It involves understanding a variety of different psychological factors.
However, for now, we'll explain it as simply as possible.
Self-control is one of the biggest drivers for completing tasks and activities. One of the factors that our self-control relies on is motivation. Motivation helps push us to complete tasks.
However, motivation can be pretty fickle. For example, we can experience demotivating factors like fear of failure or anxiety when we want to do something. Additionally, other factors can affect our behavior, like tiredness or even the knowledge that the goal we want to achieve is far off in the future.
When these factors (anxiety, fear of failure, tiredness) outweigh our self-control and motivation, we can end up procrastinating.
So, it's clear that one of the factors when finding out "why do we procrastinate" is that some tasks seem overwhelming. The best way to overcome these problems is to break information down into digestible chunks.
But how does this relate to content?
If the user's mind is looking for excuses not to do research or read, we need to help them.
As mentioned earlier, dwell time is an important ranking factor. When combined with users' natural tendency to procrastinate, the solution is more straightforward content that engages users.
There are several ways that publishers can write content that engages users. One of the best things to do is to break the content down into easy-to-understand chunks. Learning how to communicate technical ideas is a fantastic skill.
How to optimize content
We live in a complex world. There are endless amounts of data, requirements are changing quickly, and new terms and concepts are becoming popularized all the time.
Overall, this can create a feeling of confusion for the user. As we've mentioned earlier, driving traffic to your product or service takes a lot of work. Therefore, finding ways to keep the user on the site is essential. Effective optimization of your content marketing is one of the solutions to these issues.
Here are some content optimization examples and strategies that can help any content creator.
#1 Simplify language
The best products need to appeal to a wide variety of people. Users read at different levels, and in today's global marketplace, it's a mistake to think that everyone reads English as their first language.
For example, using simple verb forms like "we think," "we have," or "we learn" is much better than "we have been thinking."
When each content creator simplifies what they are saying, the user can focus on the ideas. Complex language reduces friction.
#2 Use simple terms
How you and your colleagues talk about your product won't always be the same as your users. Effective optimization means making your concepts easy to understand. Industry acronyms might save your time during the content marketing process, but they can also alienate or isolate users and lose customers.
#3 Use analogies
Analogies are a great way to break down complex ideas. It's very helpful to think about new concepts in familiar contexts. A big part of content marketing should be about making your concepts easily understood.
For example, something difficult to understand for many people, like NFTs, can be explained by using an analogy that compares NFTs to a database that records certificates of ownership for a painting.
#4 Leverage Storytelling
Stories are a time-honored way to communicate complex information. There are several ways that each content creator can use stories for effective optimization of their content.
For example, you can explain the situation a real or imagined user is in, describing what they wanted to do or their pain points. Then, you can show how your product helped them to achieve their goals and achieve a pleasant outcome.
Content marketing can make the user or the product the hero of the story. Either way, it is a powerful way to communicate how the product works.
#5 Use images
People think in different ways. Not everyone is a verbal thinker. Some people are visual thinkers; others are a combination of verbal and visual.
Effective optimization of your content marketing should use pictures, graphs, emojis, or other visualizations to communicate your message. Many challenging concepts can be quite easily broken down by a diagram or visual, meaning everyone can understand them.
Common threads of effective optimization
As you can see from the examples above, there are some common threads to effective optimization.
Three things that every content creator can take from the content optimization examples are:
#1 Removing friction
Anything that slows down or gets in the way of users understanding your content is friction. Overly complex words, complicated concepts, and even website layout can act as a roadblock for users to engage with your product.
#2 Meeting users where they are
Effective optimization looks to meet users where they are. There is a lot of competition and distractions out there. Finding ways to speak to people in ways that resonate with them, i.e., through stories or visuals or through their frame of reference via analogies, gives your content a better chance to succeed.
#3 Accounting for human psychology
A strong understanding of what motivates humans to embrace content is essential. This understanding can be in areas like how humans learn, consume information, and relate to concepts.
All three of these lessons in effective optimization influence what is known as user onboarding. Onboarding refers to the process of getting users or employees familiar with software, products, or websites.
Let's take the example of Clerbo, a software that helps businesses pre-board and onboard their new employees. When an organization hires new staff, they need to learn about the company culture, upload documents, and complete tasks or training.
Traditionally, this process required various emails to be sent back and forth. Additionally, it required a lot of questions that took up considerable work hours.
Clerbo wanted a way to help streamline their onboarding process. Specifically, they wanted to use product tours to train their clients on how to use their applications.
Clerbo choose Usetiful.com to solve their issues. Usetiful is a digital adoption platform that, among other things, allows businesses to build product tours that help to teach how to use software or websites.
Helping users to get value from a product quickly is a strong predictor of reducing bounce and churn rates. In the case of Clerbo, using product tours reduce customer queries by 50%. Additionally, it saved a significant amount of training hours for each customer.
Usetiful can be used in several onboarding contexts, such as:
- Teaching users to navigate software
- Building customer self-service applications
- Driving feature adoption
- Enhancing customer engagement
- Delivering product training
The digital adoption platform (DAP) helps businesses achieve these aims by using:
- Product tours
- Product walkthroughs
- Smart tips
- Onboarding checklists
Visit Usetiful's website today to find out more about how you can use the platform to boost your content marketing by removing the points of friction that cause users to procrastinate or churn from your product or service.
Conclusion
SEO is one of the most critical aspects of driving users to your content. However, it's a complex process that relies on many interconnected factors.
While many people believe that keywords are all important, there are many considerations that Google uses to decide on where pages rank. One of these areas is user behavior.
When a user clicks on a link, Google tracks their behavior. If they stay on the website for some time, it's a signal that the user has found what they wanted when they input their query. Should they quickly leave the site, it's a signal that the content was not relevant to their question.
Google uses this information to assess each website or page's relevance to search terms. As a result, content creators need to make sure that their websites deliver content in a way that:
a) satisfies users quickly
b) encourages them to stay on the website for a while
To achieve this stickiness, businesses need to think about how they communicate their message. Some of the best ways to accomplish this is through:
- Simple language
- Straightforward and digestible content
- Visuals
- Storytelling
- Analogies
By adopting these processes, users can become more engaged, which will mean that Google or other search engines get a signal that the content is high-quality. These signals will lead to a boost in rankings.
Driving customer experience is essential to acquiring and retaining customers. Products or services need to help users get value as soon as possible, or they will go somewhere else.
Automated customer support, tooltips, and customized UX/UI design solutions help customers feel in control and derive value from your product.
88% of customers won't return to a new product they didn't like. Customer acquisition costs are increasing all the time, and leaks like this can kill a business. Digital adoption platforms can help you cut down this 88% and help build the trust and loyalty required to drive sales, signups, subscriptions, or leads that are critical to your business.
