Last week I saw this thread by Amstel Malta on twitter which I found really cool. They were asking people to tweet their full names and then Amstel Malta would give them a rap stage name. I saw all sorts of funny names down the the long thread of tweets with a lot of comments and likes. Trust me, it was hilarious!
I found what Amstel Malta did to be a big organic digital marketing tactic. That thread converted impressions into instant engagement and it created a lot of buzz around the Amstel Malta brand.
With this, I’ll go into defining what organic digital marketing is. Some people call it inbound marketing and some others hold on to an older name, Customer-to-business marketing. But I prefer to call it organic digital marketing because it captures the essence perfectly. Organic digital marketing is the opposite of paid marketing or advertising. It therefore involves all other measures which exclude paid marketing.
You must be familiar with or at least you must have seen Google Adwords , Facebook Ads, Bing Ads and similar things. These are paid marketing tools. Social media platforms and Search Engines are paid to bring your business or whatever adverts you want in front of a larger audience. Sometimes this is known as promoted content (like on Twitter) or sponsored content. Some experts call this an artificial way of marketing because it is majorly commercial and non-personal. Paid marketing however works for big businesses and services which are bound to have a customer base as large as possible. For smaller businesses however it is not always the way to go.
Organic digital marketing is a natural, personal and interactive approach to digital marketing. It’s not like paid marketing where companies want to run massive campaigns and keep throwing out colourful images and videos on people’s faces. A good organic digital marketing campaign aims at not just gaining leads or clicks on the website but building a strong network. In organic digital marketing your customers are not fans, they are partners. Organically marketing your business online keeps customers engaged and informed and it ensures that your followers are real, in every sense of the word.
“In organic digital marketing your customers are not fans, they are partners”
THE KEY POINTS OF ANY ODM STRATEGY
I wouldn’t like to exalt any particular strategy as the best way of going about your organic digital marketing but there are certain procedures which must be present. We’ll be considering them below. And by the way, ODM stands for Organic Digital Marketing just in case you’re still trying to figure it out.
1. TARGETING
Now, like I said before, paid marketing works for big businesses. Businesses such as online shopping platforms have their ads on every nook and cranny of the internet because it is important for their kind of business. They need to make sure that their ads can pop up in front of every possible internet user so that a customer anywhere can easily decide to buy something. In organic digital marketing the opposite is the case. Organic digital marketing uses something called ‘targeting’ to get to a desired audience. Depending on your kind of business it is sometimes better to target and reach out to a specific audience.
Targeting
A lady for instance who runs a small business as a baker shouldn’t just jump into paying Facebook and Google for sponsored ads. At the end of the day she might have some returns and she might get more customers but it may not really match up to all the money she has spent on advertising. But by targeting a specific audience of pastry lovers through organic marketing, she can slowly grow and maintain a clientele base of people who really like her kind of service and would more readily patronise her business especially if indeed she is a good baker. By targeting, she will tailor her images, videos and her entire advertising content towards this audience, she will speak with customers a lot on the phone, she will maintain correspondence with her customers in a friendly manner and will keep reshaping her business to her customer’s tastes. Big companies can’t afford to reshape their services because of a few customers but small businesses can. The lady in our case study for example can decide to start baking coconut cakes because of the requests of as little as five customers.
In order to target a certain audience you must look out for a certain kind of people on social media. You can send them friend requests or follow them and have them follow you back depending on the social platform. The important thing to search specifically for your potential customers. You have to identify them. Either by their own posts or tweets or their likes or engagements or feeds and so on. You have to spot them and reach out to them. Another good way of targeting is by using the right hashtags. With the right hashtags (especially the trending ones) you can spot other people on social media who are talking about things related to your marketing content. With this you can easily spot your potential customers and you can even identify competitors, but that’s not our concern for now.
Targeting is the first step to growing a business organically. Targeting takes you to the next step which is Networking…………
KEEP IN TOUCH FOR ORGANIC DIGITAL MARKETING (PART II) WHERE WE WILL DISCUSS SOME MORE POINTS.
