While paid advertising quickly gets you noticed, organic advertising builds credibility and trust by playing the long game. In a busy online space where a business on the other side of the world can become your rival, it’s an essential strategy to help you stand out. In fact, some of the most successful marketing campaigns use a combination of organic and paid techniques.
Advertising can sometimes feel very intrusive. It’s a common complaint that it interrupts people’s lives when they’re just going about their day, and they’re not even in your target audience. Rather than getting in anyone’s face, organic advertising creates a subtler experience that establishes trust and connection. While it takes a lot longer to see results than with the rapid-fire approach of paid advertising, the results are satisfying and long-lasting.
As a full-service creative marketing agency, Anchor Digital can help you use organic marketing strategy in your own campaigns with successful outcomes. We’ll work alongside you on this cost-effective form of marketing to build a strong brand name that’s trustworthy and consistent with your values.
What Is Organic Advertising?
Organic advertising is the process of building awareness of your business through freely available content rather than paid promotion. It’s marketing that your audience comes across naturally–organically–as opposed to the kind that rockets to the top of search engine results (SERPs) thanks to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Also known as organic marketing, this form of advertising needs to add real value to customers’ lives in order to be effective.
Search engine optimisation, which involves optimising a website to rank higher in SERPs, is an essential element of organic marketing.
This kind of advertising takes many forms, and some of the most widely used include:
Blog posts
One of the key types of organic content, blog posts allow you to share in-depth information about your industry and answer your target audience’s commonly asked questions. Blogging both improves your search engine rankings and builds your brand authority.
Social media posts
These days, social media is the main avenue in which most new customers discover a business like yours. As long as you choose the right platforms, social media is an excellent way to attract new customers and keep the ones you have top of mind.
Videos
Whether they’re YouTube tutorials, Instagram reels or Facebook clips, videos convey a lot of information in an easy-to-digest format. Short-form videos also deliver the highest return on investment (ROI) of any marketing trend and will continue to be a strategy for success in 2025.
Infographics
Infographics are visual representations of data or knowledge designed to present the facts clearly and concisely. Their ability to break down even detailed and comprehensive information into an easy-to-understand format makes them a useful element of organic marketing strategy.
Podcasts
Podcasts are a fun way to reach an audience that prefers audio content and dive deep into a topic in a radio show format.
Organic Advertising Vs Paid Advertising
While the organic approach draws visitors to your website over time, paid advertising uses money to speed up the process of targeting, engaging and converting audiences. It’s similar to traditional advertising but with a data-driven spin for the digital age. Some of the most recognisable forms of paid advertising include:
Paid search ads
PPC advertising takes you straight to the top of the search results for a fee. Google Ads is the most widely used PPC platform and involves bidding on relevant keywords and paying every time your ad is clicked. The drawback of this approach is that as soon as you stop paying for advertising, your position on the top spot disappears.
Paid social media ads
Paid social media advertising is paying to promote your business on one of the many social media platforms currently out there. While Facebook is still the most popular platform to advertise on, other options like LinkedIn and TikTok allow you to reach a diverse range of audience demographics. Sponsored and boosted posts are two common types of paid social media ads.
Sponsored articles
Commonly appearing in both digital and print publications, sponsored content is a form of advertising written to the brand voice of another platform and designed to fit seamlessly into it. Sponsored articles and posts can be so subtle in their approach that you might not even recognise them for what they are until you see phrases like “paid partnership”.
Display ads
Display ads commonly resemble the kind of advertisements you might see in a magazine, but they appear on the web in formats like images, banners or videos.
The approach of combining paid and organic strategies definitely has benefits for you as a brand. It lets you create more touchpoints for the customer on the buying journey, expands your reach and creates a stronger level of brand awareness than the single-channel approach.
Tips for Organic Advertising Strategies
Here are some tips for how to succeed when it comes to organic advertising:
Understand your audience
This means doing your research into the interests, needs and pain points of your target demographics.
Provide value
Your content should be focused on offering value to your potential customers and pleasing human readers rather than bots. Remember Google’s E-E-A-T framework: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
Be authentic
Communicate in your genuine brand voice and avoid false promises and overly flashy language. Authenticity builds trust, creates connection and long-term loyalty and actually helps you stand out more than putting on “the hard sell” will.
Optimise for SEO
Marketing is always changing and so is search engine optimisation. Yet there are some SEO principles that are timeless: fast page loading speeds are always best, choosing the right keywords is always important, and the content should be good enough for others to want to link to.
Ensure your content is unique
Google is prioritising helpful, reliable content and penalising unhelpful, plagiarised or automated content. Ensure that your content is unique and original and carries the ring of authenticity.
Strengthen Your Organic Advertising Strategy with Anchor
With more than a decade in the industry, Anchor has seen many changes come and go but understands that many approaches stay relevant because they work. It’s this understanding of timeless principles combined with a finger on the pulse for new developments that give us the tools to develop your organic marketing strategy.
Our approach to SEO marketing is an integrated one, combining social media, content marketing, link building etc. Optimised for human readers rather than machines, our methods are collaborative, transparent and tested. Rather than taking an overly broad approach, we’ll focus on getting your product in front of the people who would benefit from it the most.
If you need to build your digital marketing strategy from the ground up, we can help you identify your unique selling proposition (USP) and gather data on target demographics. Our brand positioning emphasises what’s most favourable about your brand and puts that in front of your ideal audience. Our data-driven approach to brand strategy will help you grow, and our customer and market research will let you know how you should find and speak to your people. To find out more, contact the Anchor Digital team.
