Organic Marketing
In contrast to Paid Advertising, Organic marketing involves using content on our social media accounts without a budget.
Branding
Let’s start by defining exactly what branding means: branding efforts affirm and maintain the image that our business carries with it– its voice, message, and market niche, in an objective for growth in user reach and engagement. We do so by delivering content in which our audience might find value as well as attract new users to quickly understand what we do and how to compartmentalize our brand in their own minds and market understanding. Branding is measured first by impressions i.e views, and second by engagements such as likes, shares, clicks, retweets, mentions, etc.
In order to expand the reach of our brand beyond its own scope and out into that of its entire market-niche we might want to share and post links to content curated from similar brands as well as @mention some of those brands to further assimilate our own brand as part of its market and industry. Beware not to post too much content from any one singular brand, while we do want to be affiliated with them we don’t want to market their brand or product instead of our own. Content publishers, social communities and blogging platforms such as Forbes, The Guardian, Medium, Reddit, Hacker News & Google Trends are great resources for finding relevant brand content, though sometimes a google search might work even better.
Organic (our own) brand content should focus on case-studies & storytelling, describing how real users benefit from our product and the story of the people behind the product, People being the operative word. We’ll also try to include our posts as part of larger conversations, within context, take notice not to spam, not use the most popular keywords, or keywords which were popular but are no longer trending, nor keywords no one uses.
You don’t want to get lost in a pond that’s too big, nor be contained in an unengaging conversation.
Marketing
Marketing efforts are limited to those specific posts aimed at presenting users with our products and services, leading them to our website or landing pages via a call-to-action (CTA) and converting them to register, purchase and use those services. Unlike branding, marketing success is measured by click-through-rate (CTR) and conversion rate, so no amount of likes or shares will save you when your audience simply won’t convert leaving you only to scream ‘submit the !@#$% form already!’
The above ad for Rolls-Royce, considered to be on of the most successful ad campaigns in history, has a lot to teach– from the product research that’s been done to come up with that specific headline, to the boldly marked price tag aimed at qualifying leads, and the brief bullet points characterizing the article aiming at catching the reader’s attention span continuously. Just something to think about.