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During economic downturns or when a brand struggles to meet commercial expectations, business leaders often prioritize short-term goals like margin over long-term brand building. As a result, organic marketing strategies are frequently seen as expendable, a “nice-to-have” that can be easily cut because they don’t always deliver the immediate commercial impact that financial leaders desire.
While this might seem sensible at first, it’s a shortsighted approach that can significantly jeopardize a brand’s future visibility. Consider organic marketing as the equivalent of maintaining a “shop on the high street”—it ensures your brand remains visible and top-of-mind, even when direct advertising is reduced.
Why Organic Marketing Matters
Paid strategies have their place, but most brands cannot and should not bid on every relevant term. What happens when someone searches for something specific, and your brand no longer has organic content to capture that niche? Without organic marketing, your brand may no longer appear in searches for items like navy blue swimsuits or the most reliable home alarm systems. A competitor will inevitably fill that gap, and over time, as your site traffic declines, so will your brand’s mental availability.
Without a strong organic presence, will people remember your brand, or will they simply click on the first option they see?
This is why organic marketing is crucial for maintaining brand equity. It ensures a consistent, discoverable presence, even when your brand cannot afford to outbid competitors in paid search or other marketing channels. For brands, deciding to cut the organic marketing budget is as significant as closing physical locations. Unlike pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, organic marketing isn’t something that can be turned on and off like a tap. It can take months or even years, especially in highly competitive sectors like travel and finance, to build the authority, expertise, and trust needed for an effective strategy.
An Organic Framework for Success
The challenge lies in proving the commercial value of brand-building efforts and constantly reminding senior teams that a successful organic strategy involves more than just sales. Metrics like reach and engagement, visibility and share of search, awareness and recall, as well as traffic and sales, should all contribute to the full picture of organic marketing’s impact. Our agency has faced this challenge, and we are now developing a framework that examines organic marketing’s role in both “driving demand” and “servicing demand.” This more nuanced approach measures its impact across the customer journey, helping marketers build a stronger case for organic marketing to present to the board.
Marketers can use a mix of tactics to quantify the effects of organic marketing, such as:
- Brand lift and consideration metrics, including surveys, search trends, and market listening, to understand how organic marketing drives awareness and interest.
- Funnel engagement metrics, like content click-through rates and website referrals, to see how organic marketing facilitates customer actions.
- Operational efficiencies, such as reducing customer service inquiries to call centers or improving self-serve product selection and purchases.
- Cross-channel attribution modeling to isolate the unique contribution of organic marketing to business outcomes.
This framework recognizes organic marketing’s dual purpose: as both a top-of-funnel awareness driver and a bottom-of-funnel conversion tool. By clearly outlining its contribution at various stages, marketers can make a stronger case for sustained investment in organic marketing.
Building Strong Foundations with Data
Integrating data across siloed platforms is a significant challenge for marketers, as is maintaining a long-term measurement mindset when leadership focuses on short-term key performance indicators (KPIs). Another challenge is the constantly evolving marketing algorithms that can dramatically impact organic reach and make consistency difficult to achieve.
To overcome these challenges, brands need to adopt a more strategic, cross-functional approach to organic marketing measurement. This involves aligning KPIs with specific business objectives, leveraging advanced analytics capabilities where possible, and clearly demonstrating organic marketing’s role in influencing the entire customer journey—from awareness to conversion and loyalty-building.
The key is to strike the right balance between performance-focused paid media and brand-building organic efforts. Understanding your brand’s strength compared to your competitors’ is crucial. The goal is to achieve short-term gains without compromising long-term growth.