Advertising your business can take up a large percentage of your budget. Whether you go for Google ads, social media ads, or any other kind of paid-for advertising, the cost can quickly add up. While paid-for advertising can bring you good levels of success (it can also fail too though), there are actually some highly effective organic ways to advertise your business.
Organic advertising comes with two benefits, not only can it increase your customer base (and therefore your sales figures), but as it doesn’t cost you anything, it’s something you can do long-term. Advertising that can be sustained for long periods of time can do a great job of continuously bringing in new customers to your business, and that is something that can take your business to new levels of success.
Help Current Customers Promote Your Business
Your current customer base is a perfect advertising tool. They have found your business, they have purchased from your business, and they have experienced everything your business has to offer. They know how good your customer service is and they know that your products are of extremely high quality. That’s all well and good but if they are able to share their praise, other customers could come your way too.
A study found that 92% of consumers trust referrals from people they know. That’s something that can be used to organically advertise your business. It can be as simple as making your website, product pages, and blog posts shareable on social media. This can be very effective at starting online conversations about your business. For example, one of your current customers might share the product page of their most recent purchase from you on their social media. Their followers see the product and start asking questions about it. Your customer who shared the page starts explaining how much they love it, why it’s so good, how quickly it arrived, etc which leads to some of their online friends purchasing it too.
Your customers could be encouraged to refer their friends to your business through incentives. More than 50% of people are likely to give a referral if offered an incentive, social media recognition, or access to a loyalty program. By simply offering a small discount on their next order, a mention on social media, or some kind of small reward, your customers could end up referring several new customers to your business.
Build An Online Community
An online community can be an effective way of organically advertising. This could be as simple as being as interactive as possible with your social media accounts. Engaging posts, polls, competitions, and fun content can go a long way in bringing more people into your online community.
You could take this a step further and create a private Facebook group (or other platform alternatives). Having a private Facebook group helps create a feeling of importance as the content shared within it is for members only. This creates a sense of exclusivity which can quickly build loyalty.
If your community is loyal, many of the members will do all they can to help your business. Whether that’s by telling their friends about it, sharing your posts, repeat buying, or leaving positive online reviews, your online community can be a powerful organic advertising tool
Always Keep SEO In Mind
SEO will always be a huge factor in organically advertising your business. New trends appear fairly frequently so it can seem to be a never-ending task. However, if you can continuously improve your SEO ranking, your website can pull in some big numbers resulting in an increase in customers and sales.
Improving your SEO could include things like publishing regular blog posts that cover popular keywords related to your business, updating product descriptions, correctly naming images, and other similar tasks. While some business owners might see SEO as a very technical task, small changes on a regular basis can be enough to keep your business website climbing the rankings on search result pages.
There’s no denying that SEO takes work. It can be quite time-consuming and tedious at times but the benefits it can bring can not be overlooked. If you consider that 75% of people never scroll past the first page of search engines, getting your website on page 1 of a Google search should be a top priority for organic advertising.
Don’t Wait For Customers To Come To You, Go To Them
If the industry your business is in has parts of the real world or online world where lots of potential customers spend time, it could be a good idea to go and join them. In simple terms, there are some businesses where a lot of potential customers will use one social media platform more than the others. For example, fashion fans are probably more likely to use Instagram as this allows them to see the fashion items they like as well as share images of their own. For other industries, Twitter may be more popular than any of the other social media platforms.
If you know and understand the behavior of people who could very likely become a customer of your business, it makes complete sense to go to the places they spend time and engage with them. The engagement doesn’t have to be direct advertising either, simply joining in relevant conversations, demonstrating that you’re an expert in your field, and showing that you’re trustworthy – all these things can be great advertising strategies.
When it comes to real-world places, things like conferences, events, and showcases can be very useful places for meeting potential customers. If you take your business to one of these events, whether that be as a stallholder, guest speaker, or sponsor, you could be surprised at how many people suddenly have an interest in your business.
It all comes back to community, people usually want to look after people who are similar to themselves. If your business joins a community of people who share a common interest, referrals, reviews, and recommendations are much more likely to happen.
Listen To Your Customers
Another great thing about your current customers is that they’ve experienced every aspect of your business that new customers will have to go through. That puts them in a strong position to offer useful feedback on how well your business is doing things.
Getting feedback and reviews is all well and good but actually listening to what your customers are saying and reacting appropriately to it can actually act as an organic advertising strategy.
Imagine one of your customers provides feedback about your business. They let you know that they love the product they got from you but they found the checkout process a little bit confusing in places. This feedback is then repeated by several more customers. If you take this feedback on board, make some changes to make the checkout process a little bit smoother, and then let the customers who provided the feedback know, this can build huge amounts of loyalty.
Listening to customers shows them that they are important to you and you truly value them. Once they feel valued, their loyalty to you grows and they are much more likely to want to help your business succeed. This is when they start putting effort into sharing your business with their friends and family leading to new customers and greater success.
Share Useful Content That Isn’t a Sales Pitch
Sometimes, one of the best ways of advertising your business is by offering useful information for free. This might sound counterintuitive as, after all, a business needs to make money in order to stay operational. However, considering what is important to potential customers at the time they discover your content is what can make the difference between making a future sale and them going elsewhere.
Let’s say that your business sells TVs. A potential customer is at the research stage of their purchase so they aren’t ready to buy right now, but they are researching which type of TV they will eventually buy. If they find one of your blog posts on different types of TV and the pros and cons of each one, this can be an extremely useful resource for them. They read through your blog post and make a decision based on the information you shared within it. When they come to finally make their purchase, they go back to the blog post, follow a link and end up on one of your product pages.
If the content you share is all about promoting your products and trying to make a sale, this can easily put the readers off your business as it feels too pushy or like you’re saying things about the products in order to sway their choice. Just by sharing accurate and relevant information, you can organically advertise your business to people who are likely to be customers in the future.
Meet New People
It can be easy to get lost in the world of SEO, referrals, marketing, newsletters, emails, and website updates. Business owners can quickly get into the habit of investing all of their time in technical strategies to promote their business to as many people as possible.
One organic way of advertising your business that often gets overlooked is meeting new people. This could be at organized networking events or it could be on your daily walks or at a friend’s party. Meeting new people can be good for you and good for business.
If you think back to the last time you met someone new, what’s usually one of the first questions someone asks? It tends to be “what do you do for work?”. This opens up an opportunity to talk to someone about your business. You’re not doing a sales pitch, you’re just talking about your work and what your business does.
While talking about your business to one person might not seem like too much of a big deal, that person could talk about it to someone else. They could even be in a position where collaboration is possible which could benefit your business in some way.
Meeting new people is important for life in general. It’s an added bonus that it can also help organically advertise your business too.
