The Fallacy of the Organic
In this month’s article we’ll take you through our view of organics and why we’ve come to think like that.
We often hear the term “organic” heralded by business owners. Organics are given the highest priority because they are seen as being the highest return on investment. However, we take a different view of organics.
So what are organics?
For those that don’t know, organic is the term used to describe actions which occurred without any interaction from marketing. This is what makes them so attractive to business owners because they supposedly generate revenue without having being engaged with media spend to do so.
We don’t believe this. In full…
We like to liken this to a very simple example:
When was the last time you woke up after having a dream about company you’ve never heard of before and immediately went to a device to search for them?
We’ll wager on never.
We have engaged with a vast number of businesses who all “appear” to have a high number of organics. Whether that be website traffic or sales. The element we question with this is fundamentally rooted in technology i.e that traffic/those sales are only seen as “organic” because the technology is classifying them as such. The issue is, that unless the technology is able to see all of the times that person was touched with any kind of media, it will be inaccurate. For example, if a person clicks an ad on September 1st, goes to the site has a look around then leaves, come back to the site themselves and purchases on October 1st, most tools will classify this as organic. But it wasn’t was it? That person saw and clicked an ad.
They were first introduced to this example brand using paid media. This is the fallacy of organics.
The way we look at this is as an attribution challenge. This is luckily much simpler for smaller brands.
The reason its simpler is because it is almost entirely likely that some form of media (not just paid) introduced that (prospective) customer to your brand. There is likely very little (impactful at least) word of mouth occurring so anything that isn’t obviously classified as originating from media is clearly erroneous.
The way that we combat this is by taking a holistic approach to marketing initially. Taking each channel in its own merit, looking for trends in traffic when specific actions occur within each channel but raising this up to a broader level to understand channel interactions and opportunities for efficient capitalisation. Ultimately, overall marketing spend divided total sales is the best first approach. Then looking for increased marketing spends leading to increased sales volumes.
We’ve used this approach to great success for our clients, helping them get control over their marketing and making it straightforward to invest in advertising and stimulate business growth.