7 Simple Ways to Market Your Book and Brand Organically Increase your brand's awareness, engage your book readers, and build your business reach.
By Saba Tekle
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Increasing your brand awareness, engaging your book readers and building your business reach depends on one booster: marketing. Becoming a recognizable brand or author can take years. But thankfully there are ways to guarantee gradual success. Marketing comes in here. However, it is up to you to decide on the market strategy.
You can either market your brand or book organically or use a paid advertisement strategy. Although both marketing strategies bring about the targeted result, paid advertisements tend to bring results within a short period. The organic marketing takes time. Below, I'll define organic marketing and reveal seven ways to get the best out of it.
Related: 3 Ways to Drive More Organic Search Traffic Without Spending a Dime
What is organic marketing?
Organic marketing is a strategy that involves driving the targeted consumers and traffic to the website without using sponsored posts or paid advertisements. Organic marketing can be in any form where you do not pay directly to anyone or any platform. Email newsletters, unpaid Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and WhatsApp posts are examples of organic marketing.
If you are an author, a brand or a business owner and do not want to pay for advertisements, you must know that you may not get the desired result instantly. You may not be able to cover different locations effectively. With that being said, here are seven ways to market your brand and book organically:
1. Exchange products for testimonials
Never underestimate the power of positive reviews. Consumers tend to believe other consumers when they know they have already used the product they want to buy. For instance, before some people buy a product, they read the product reviews. They watch out for the complaints before deciding to buy that product. Share your product with reputable people, and ask for positive reviews or testimonials in return.
2. Get support and people invested by asking for opinions and guidance
The fact is that there is always at least one person who has gone down the path you are about to follow, and there are experts in every field. Asking for opinions and guidance from experts will not only help you create better products, but you will also learn how to market better.
As you build your brand, look at your digital audience as a way of getting and finding support as well as referrals. You can get feedback on book covers and find experts who may want to team up with you. It's a gentle way to warm up a cold market (people unfamiliar with you or your brand).
3. Be active on social media
Social media is one of the easiest and most efficient ways to market a brand or book organically. But many people don't know how to get the best from it. As a brand, you can also use this medium to communicate with your target audience.
Before creating business accounts on popular platforms, ask yourself if you can effectively maintain them or stay active. If you are inactive on any platform, your consumer may see you as unprofessional. If you can't preserve activity on all of them, it is better to effectively manage one or two accounts where you have more significant followers.
Ensure that you post new content regularly. Follow similar accounts or pages to get updates. Join groups in your expertise, and participate in conversations. When questions are asked, feel free to share your ideas, and avoid excess self-promotion.
Related: The 3 Ways to Market Your Brand Without a Budget
4. Engage with customers
As we all need air to live, organic marketing requires a strong relationship with customers to survive. To build a strong relationship with your customers, you need to increase engagement; keeping in touch with them is not too much.
Always respond to as many positive and negative comments as possible. Like, share, retweet and comment on your consumer's post. You may even do a live Q&A session using hashtags like #Ask______. The responses you give to your customers during this session will help market your brand without paying a dime. They'll also increase your followers and even strengthen customers' interest in you.
5. Provide timeless value
When posting or engaging with customers, you want to provide timeless content, give value and build rapport. Timeless or evergreen content is relevant regardless of the time. For instance, you don't want to market a product or advice on every current trend. You may also want to provide value that can extend past the current year and will remain relevant in the event of unforeseen future trends.
6. Create SEO-friendly content
For a brand adopting an organic marketing strategy, creating SEO-friendly content is a must. If you want your book, business or brand to rank higher on search engines, you must first do thorough research. Make sure that you know the terms and keywords customers usually search. Following that, you'll need to create valuable content that responds to their search.
However, knowing that SEO is more than just using keywords is crucial. It ensures that your content is more understandable and noticeable to your audience and search engines. In addition, you'll need to make sure your website loads quickly and includes a title and description, alt text for photos, backlinks and more.
In the opinion of more than 70% of marketers, SEO is significantly more effective than advertising. It can increase lead generation, conversion and traffic when done correctly. Your content will perform better in search engine results and draw in more people if it is user-friendly.
Related: 4 Steps to Grow Your Organic Search Traffic
7. Guest blogging
Many prominent brand magazines seek writers to create blog content for their websites. This practice is known as guest blogging. Any business may profit in a variety of ways from guest blogging. You may become recognized as an industry authority, network with other key influencers and reach an entirely new market by contributing your knowledge to other websites.
Additionally, publishing guest content on your site will enable you to provide your audience with different viewpoints. Having guest articles on your blog is a terrific method to keep readers interested, because you may become bored with the same old content direction. You will also benefit from the added exposure from your guest writers sharing their content on your website to their followers or network.
