Utilize Organic Marketing To Maximize Print-on-demand Sales

Paid advertising and influencers might be cool, but you must admit, it costs a lot. It helps your print-on-demand store converting customers, yes, but in the long run, you will need to consider using organic methods to increase print-on-demand sales.

What is Organic Marketing?

Organic Marketing is a strategy, using different methods without spending money directly to raise your traffic naturally from time to time. It can be anything, either it’s a blog post, case study, featured content of customers, or Facebook tagged post.

But don’t get it wrong here, both print-on-demand advertising and organic methods need your investment. Because there are some methods that might cost you a little, as in you use email services to implement your email marketing strategy. Yes, it costs you but at a lower rate compared to advertising or influencer for certain.

Organic marketing might not raise your traffic instantly, but it can help you to increase traffic steadily in the long run. Also, it will help to build a brand of varied content and value for your customers. So, if you’re looking for a strategy to help your online business to grow in long term, then organic marketing is the one you’re looking for.

However, there’s a con is that you will need to invest your time in it, instead of setting up some advertising campaign. You will actually work on it, measure performance and put effort into it, so get ready to dive in.

Organic Marketing Strategy

Your strategy can focus on different kinds of goals, or divide goals into different ways like channels or methods. In my opinion, it will be best to create a strategy corresponding to your touchpoint, which is your channels, because it helps you to manage the strategy from a macro perspective.

But remember, it’s important to understand that the ultimate goal of having a strategy is to make it clear and straight to the point. In this article, I will help you to make goals for organic marketing by channels, dividing to 3 main traffic sources:

• Print-on-demand online store (or Website): use to convert sales, to raise traffic and awareness to your brand. The ultimate goal is to have strong content to increase your website keyword ranking and to optimize search engines.
• Social media: use to engage with customers and enhance brand awareness. The goal of your social channels is that you can successfully build a community for your customers. Because once you have a community, it helps to approach customers easier, especially potential ones.
• Customer relationship: internal channels to keep in touch with your loyal customers, in order to retain or raise their interest to re-visit your store (such as Email marketing, or SMS marketing)

After determining goals for your touchpoints, now, you will need a tactics plan for each channel. A tactics plan should be detail-oriented. It means that you need to break down the activities that you need to do in order to achieve the channel goal.

Source: Internet

The plan should also include the reasons why you need to do those activities, and mention a list of tactics goal for each activity, as in this case, what the outcome that you expect to get out from each activity is.

Organic Tactics

Moving on to certain activities to kick off your organic marketing strategy, let’s talk about some marketing tactics that you can implement with each traffic source. In this blog post, we will be discussed the traffic sources and its tactics of Store sites and Social media.

1. Store Website

We will separate this part into 2 different focuses: the design of website and the organic marketing activities that can be implemented on website.

Web Design

First, let’s talk about the website design. You might need a little experience or knowledge about designing UI/UX - it means the user interface and user experience. But what should really be your top focus in delivering a successful design of website is the page speed and the clear design in overall.

Because those are the first two impressions that your customers will experience once they enter the store. For preparation, I would recommend you to use some popular store site builders like Shopify, Woocommerce, Wix,…

These builders allow you to use or purchase themes that are compatible with their system instantly, helping you to save more time in setting up a complete store. Furthermore, it allows having add-on applications or plugins that can help your store design to enhance even better in such a short time. After setting up print-on-demand store, you can check for your site’s page speed on Google’s Pagespeed Insights or on your theme settings (depends on the builder).

Source: Shopify

Traffic Sources

Moving on to the second part of website traffic source, to raise organic traffic for any kind of website, the top focus that you need to pay attention to is search engine optimization (SEO). Why? Because search engines are the key to everyone’s concerns.

No matter you have a dumb question in mind, or you have a huge concern that you need to look up for yourself first, the first thing people would think about is to Google it up. Since Google and its algorithm play an important role in ranking your site on search results, you will need to put some effort to make sure your site ranking is in a good position.

But how? Normally, people would focus on content of the site, as in the keyword of your niche. For example, if you’re selling personalized gifts, your product name and tags should definitely include “personalized” or “personalized gift”. Search engines basically work as a tool to check for the similarity between the search keyword and site content, to display the most relevant results to visitors.

Now, what’s else you can do to increase this power of similarity? Build a blog channel within the print-on-demand store site. Words are a powerful tool in SEO, and blog articles can help you to emphasize the benefits of wording. Creating a blog is the most basic function of any website, even for a store builder.

Take a look at Shopify, even it’s designed to allow users to quickly create an online store, you will always see that it also offers a blog post feature. As I mentioned, the blog post is an efficient way to help you boost your store traffic with SEO and organic search.

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2. Social Media

Next off is the second traffic source of this article: Social media. Social media, before advertising and its growth until today, was an organic channel itself. By using post engagement and also SEO, you can use social media to present your products to viewers and even make sales directly on these social channels. Nowadays, when social media is becoming even more powerful and smarter, it offers more tools for its users to gain organic traffic.

Tools

What you need to learn from social media, it’s to use the functions of a post to get your content going viral. There are several features that can definitely help you in this:

• Hashtag
• Tagging
• Post media: image and video
• Carousel: images, videos or combination of both

With each of these features, your post can easily be known by friends or even friends of friends. Think of it as a butterfly effect, once it is shared, it will spread out like a “virus”. But to make this idea work, you will also need to focus on content.

Unlike the content of a blog, social posts should be simple, catchy, and trending. People love to share trends topics, as it is more up-to-date and concerned by a large audience rather than other kinds of topics.

Content Types

Social media is all about engagement. Accordingly, the content of social post needs to focus on followers and making them engaged since it is one of the most powerful that makes social media become popular.

Not only people can react to post content, but they are also able to comment and share that content instantly. Live streaming was created also to serve this engagement purpose to its higher cause, bringing even more traffic to social media marketers.

Some high-engaging content types that you can refer to:

• Videos
• Images carousel
• Livestream
• Story

Apart from the content, be mindful of what channel you are using. Although Facebook is the giant of social media, other networks are also rising at its best, including Youtube, Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter,…

So make sure to keep your marketing channels up to date and deliver to the right target audience.

What You should Avoid while Creating Content?

Lastly, there are a few heads-ups for you once you start working on these channels' content. Things you should avoid in order to build a healthy and sustainable channel:

• Plagiarism: Please don’t copy from other’s work. If you refer to someone else’s content, make sure that you remember to include a source of reference.
• Controversial topic: Even though you need to follow trends, I would recommend you to avoid controversial topics, such as politics, or scandals,… because besides the positive engagement results, you need to prepare for haters to come.
• Irrelevant content: Remember your focused goals, don’t let your content topic to wander around too far from the first goal set. Or else, it might confuse your visitors.
• Automate everything: Automation does help you in engaging with visitors faster, but don’t depend on it too much. According to Neil Patel, sometimes it is best to have a real-time post, because it can help your page to get engaged better than a scheduled one.
• Post only about products and promotion: It will soon bore your fandom and as a result, it will lower your traffic and engagement. Instead, post some evergreen content (content that can appeal and last longer on people’s newsfeed), or write a blog about knowledge content (which drives more traffic using SEO within the article).

And that is all for the basic knowledge of organic marketing for print-on-demand sellers. What’s the struggle of yours while implementing organic marketing? Let us know by commenting below and we will see you on our next blog post.

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