January 1, 2022

Are you creating enough organic content for your business?

In the world of digital marketing, there are two key strategies that will grow your reach and convert more leads. Paid advertising and organic content.

Paid online advertising is a hot topic. Google and social media platforms can deliver massive reach. And they can also target very specific audiences. So paid marketing can deliver great results in a short time frame.

But that doesn’t mean organic content is dead. The growth of paid advertising is making high quality organic content even more valuable. It can counterbalance growing immunity to direct advertising and develop long-term relationships built on trust and demonstrated value.

Pursuing paid advertising strategies without high quality organic content is risky. It could create negative experiences for people who click on your ads but find your website content doesn’t meet their expectations.

What is organic content?

Organic content is material created to naturally bring traffic to your company and product (i.e. website) by providing information your target audience is already looking for. Any content you create that you don’t need to pay a third party to advertise is organic content.

Organic content creation forms part of content marketing or inbound marketing. Rather than advertising directly to your target customers, your target audience naturally finds you when they are looking for information to help them solve a problem. It is a long-term strategy that draws people to your website gradually over time.

Types of organic content creation

Different types of organic content include:

  • blog posts — on your own website as well as guest posts on other relevant sites
  • social media posts
  • website content like product/service descriptions and landing pages
  • e-newsletters
  • downloadable resources like case studies, white papers, e-books and how to guides
  • videos
  • infographics

Paid advertising, on the other hand, includes boosted social media posts, sponsored blog articles, pay-per-click adverts, search ads and banner ads.

What organic content should I be creating?

The best content marketing mix for you depends on your business and your target market.

To understand what content is going to deliver the best results, it pays to invest the time and effort into developing a solid content marketing strategy. A well-defined strategy will ensure all your content creation efforts align with your business goals and your target audience.

Like any marketing activity, content creation without some kind of strategy or plan is unlikely to deliver the results you are looking for. Publishing content ad hoc could even have a negative impact on your brand and relationships if it does not meet your target audience’s expectations in terms of value and relevance.

What should be in a content marketing strategy?

The key components of a content marketing strategy include:

  1. Business/Marketing/Content Goals: All content creation activities should tie directly into your broader business and marketing goals
  2. Content mission: What end outcome do you want your content to achieve for your audience? This could be to educate, inspire or entertain
  3. Target audience: The more specific you can be about who you want to attract to your business, and who your content will serve, the more effective your content will be in delivering value
  4. Channels: This is where you can start defining the types of content you will create based on your target audience preferences. Remember, you don’t need to be creating content across all channels and platforms, just the ones where your target audience prefers to hang out and get their information
  5. Process: Consider how you are going to create, edit, publish and monitor your organic content. If you choose to create your content in-house you need to consider if you have the skills and resources needed, or how you will grow it. If you choose to outsource you need to consider who you want to work with and how much you want to be involved in the content creation process.
  6. Measurement: To know whether your content strategy is successful you need to define the parameters you will use to monitor and measure success. Metrics like search rankings, website traffic, page views, link clicks, email sign ups and customer enquiries can be used to explore what is or isn’t working.

Assessing the success of your content

Consistently creating great content requires a lot of time and effort. You need to understand what is and isn’t working so you can tweak your strategy and achieve return on your investment.

A great tool for this is a content audit. A content audit looks at both internal and external metrics to assess your content marketing efforts. It will help you understand what content to create more (or less) of.

A content audit should address these questions:

  • How many people are viewing the content?
  • What content are people engaging with most?
  • How well does the content rank in search results?
  • Is the content still relevant?
  • What content are competitors producing?
  • How well does competitor content rank in search results?
  • What content needs to be added/updated/removed?

Making use of content marketing services

If you are just starting out with content marketing, the options and volume of content creation can be overwhelming.

One of the key ingredients for content marketing success is consistency. Regularly publishing organic, high-value content through your chosen marketing channels will build on itself and create a bank of marketing assets that will keep drawing people to your website over time.

But this consistency requires an investment of time, effort and money. For many small businesses, it can be a challenge to find or build content marketing expertise internally.

Making use of content marketing services is an attractive option to help you tap into the potential of organic content for growing your website traffic and sales funnel.

Organic content marketing services can include:

  • Content strategy development
  • Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy
  • Social media strategy
  • Content audits
  • Content writing for blogs, downloadable resources, social media and email marketing
  • Website copywriting
  • Video production
  • Graphic design

The key benefits of outsourcing your content marketing is that you can access specialist expertise and achieve scale in your content creation that might not be possible using in-house resources.

To sum it all up…

  • Organic content naturally brings people to your company, product or website when they are looking for information about a product/service/problem/solution
  • Content marketing is a long-term strategy that builds brand credibility and trust
  • Organic content complements paid advertising — they work together to grow your reach and convert leads
  • Effective content marketing starts with a solid content marketing strategy
  • Content should align with your customer’s interests and preferences
  • Using a content marketing service can help you access specialist expertise and achieve scale in your content creation

Need help building your content strategy or content pipeline? Get in touch today for a free 30-min phone consultation to see how we can help you build content for your business.