The Power of Organic Growth:

How Purpose-Led Brands Can Thrive Without Paid Ads

No matter what kind of business they’re building, entrepreneurs tend to prioritize growth and growth-centric strategies above all else. After all, they have bills to pay. Employees who are expecting paychecks. Dreams and goals that they hope to meet sooner rather than later.

And for purpose-led brands, the motivations for growth often run deeper. Growth in a purpose-driven business means you’re making a difference for a cause you’re passionate about. You’re helping people by offering products or services that solve a problem they couldn’t solve before. You’re working on something that matters beyond just the bottom line, and every growth step proves you’re making a greater impact in tangible ways.

But the problem that many purpose-led brands face is that they don’t know how to achieve the visibility that’s necessary to sustain business growth. They may have a few fuzzy ideas about marketing and branding, but for many, there’s no real organic growth marketing strategy or plans in place.

This guide is a great place to start, especially if you don’t have the means or desire to pay for ads. Here, we’ll cover the ins and outs of achieving organic growth in today’s digital landscape. More importantly, we’ll highlight how you can showcase your purpose-driven identity in a way that boosts your brand recognition while also reminding customers about the mission that drives you.

Paid vs. Organic Growth

Before we get into the pros and cons of each, let’s cover what paid growth and organic growth actually mean. Paid growth, also sometimes referred to as paid media, is a kind of growth your brand achieves by paying for ads and other third-party placements that boost your visibility, most often through your preferred channels and with your preferred audience. These days, the majority of paid growth opportunities are found in the digital world. Examples of paid growth solutions include paid ads or sponsored posts on social media platforms, paid ads on search engines or Google Ads, and advertisements in other forms of media, like television, radio, and print.

Organic growth, which consists of both owned and earned media, is growth in brand recognition that your company achieves without paying for or outsourcing that recognition opportunity. Organic growth requires creativity and a strong digital presence; frequent reminders to your existing customers and to potential customers that you exist go a long way in organic growth. Organic growth can be achieved by reaching your audience through owned media, like new blogs on your website, email newsletters, and original social media posts. Organic growth that you have less control over, but that is equally valuable, is earned media; this might include positive online reviews, social media mentions and tags, and word-of-mouth praise that your customers pass along to people who will become new customers. 

The Pros and Cons of Paid Growth

Paid growth has significant potential for the right business, but it isn’t necessarily the right fit for everyone. Here are the pros and cons we’ve noticed with paid growth campaigns and opportunities:

The Pros and Cons of Organic Growth

Organic growth can happen in dozens of ways, but it can also be an elusive and difficult way to achieve growth goals. Here, we’ve highlighted the pros and cons that often come with focusing your efforts on organic growth:

Tips to Make Organic Growth Happen for Your Purpose-Driven Business

We know it can be difficult to do it right and do it consistently, but creating content for your organic growth efforts is worth it. If you’re not sure how to pursue organic growth with your current marketing strategy, these are some of the tips that we have successfully implemented for our purpose-driven clients:

Nurture Partnerships and Relationships Within Your Niche

Your relationships are some of the best organic tools for growth you can find, and what’s better is that they offer many different pathways toward growth. You can establish an official partnership with brands that complement your product and service offerings but still align with your values and goals. You can join networking groups and online forums to gather tips from like-minded professionals in similar fields. There’s no right or wrong way to do this, as long as you build those relationships with intention.

When using your partnerships and relationships to increase organic growth, consider taking these steps:

• Trade useful services with a business that can support you in areas where you don’t have the knowledge or resources, and vice versa.
• Invite another business owner to be a guest writer on your blog or a guest speaker on your podcast.
• Co-lead a workshop where you combine your areas of expertise into a valuable presentation or offering for your audience(s).
• Brainstorm together; even if you aren’t creating anything organic together, you might each have ideas that could help the other one’s business or digital presence grow in new ways.

Post Content That Aligns With Your Values

Purpose-led businesses draw the right customers in and grow organically when they make their mission and values clear. The best way to do that is by creating consistent, multichannel, multiformat content that clearly illustrates who you are, what you offer, and how your efforts tie into a bigger-picture impact goal. 

In many cases, you won’t have to directly tell your audience why they should care about the same things your brand cares about; chances are, if they’re reading what your brand has to say, they already care about these things and are looking for businesses that share their values. Instead, you should focus on a balance of good storytelling and establishing your expertise in your specialty area with educational content. The proof that your content doesn’t need to be over-the-top sales-y or include a direct pitch? According to a recent study by Conductor, consumers are 131% more likely to buy from companies after they’ve finished reading a piece or several pieces of that brand’s educational content. Good storytelling and straightforward education content, when it aligns with your values, sells well.

Create Community-Building Opportunities for Your Audience

Just like your customers want to find brands that align with their values, they probably also want to find peers and fellow consumers who share those ideals. Creating a community for your different audience members helps them to meet one another and feel more connected to your brand, which ultimately drives organic growth among both existing customers and potential customers.

But how can you build community in a way that leads to organic growth for your business? The answer isn’t simple, but that’s a good thing: There are dozens of ways to do it, and you can try multiple ways at once:

• Create interactive social posts and campaigns that encourage users to comment, tag their friends, have conversations with each other, and more.
• Add a community forum section to your website that enables customers to talk to each other.
• Especially for smaller businesses where your focus is local, set up community meetup and workshop opportunities so your audience can network with you and each other.
• Respond to your followers’ comments and tags consistently.
• Incentivize word-of-mouth and referral marketing for your customers with discount modes, prize drawings, and more.

The communities that you build offer long-term opportunities for organic growth, because you never know what connections your audience will build with each other and what new customers they’ll reach out to over time because of your efforts.

Adhere to SEO Best Practices

While following SEO (search engine optimization) best practices is less flashy than most of these other organic growth tactics, it really does work. Having content that ranks better than your competitors’ content gets you noticed more often. And once the right people find your quality content through these higher rankings, they’re more likely to keep coming back to you and eventually make a purchase.

When working on improving your company’s SEO strategies, there are plenty of places where you can start to capitalize on new growth opportunities. For example, look at how your competitors are ranking for different relevant search terms that your audience might look for. It’s as simple as searching for those terms yourself and documenting their ranking number, any featured snippets they earn, and anything else you notice that feels important to their ranking. Through a competitive audit of these competitors, you can take note if they’re outranking you for important keywords and keyphrases and take steps toward creating content that will compete better. 

But SEO isn’t just about looking at your competitors; it’s primarily about looking at your own website and thinking about what would make it better, more consistent, and more user-friendly. If you discover you’re missing something important that is hurting your ability to show up on the first page of Google search results, incorporate that missing piece into your site and content as soon as possible. Plenty of tools, such as Google Analytics and SEMRush, can help you identify and mitigate these issues, including issues you wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.

Pro tip: Longtail keywords, especially in blogs, can be your friend. If someone searches for that very specific question or phrase and they see you’re ranking as a top expert, they’ll be more likely to move down the funnel. So don’t focus all of your content efforts on one keyword or a short keyphrase; think about the questions your customers might ask, and create content that centers around and answers those questions directly.

Be Consistent

This is a simple tip that makes a huge difference. Consistency is key and gets your purpose-led brand noticed. If you’re not consistent, the algorithms in search engines and social media channels are less likely to show your content higher up in the feed, which means it is less likely to be seen. In our experience, consistency is always rewarded over occasional perfection in content creation.

So post on your social accounts consistently. Stay up to date with frequent outreach and email marketing. Write on your blog regularly. And do all of this while maintaining your brand voice and remaining transparent. Don’t let your audience forget about you, and more importantly, don’t switch up on your values when it gets hard.

Organically Grow With a Partner That Gets It

Purpose-led brands have a lot on their plates, and marketing isn’t always the number one priority. We get that and we get why it happens. But we also know, from our own experience and the experiences of our clients, that focusing on organic growth and other focused marketing strategies can help all areas of the business grow in unexpected ways.

If you’re ready to work on your organic growth numbers but aren’t sure where you’ll get the time or internal resources to make it happen, that’s where we come in. Mane Impact specializes in this kind of work, and as a purpose-led brand, we understand how important it is that we never lose sight of your mission and values while pursuing those goals.