The State of Organic Marketing in 2022: A Glance at the Top Organic Marketing Trends

Organic marketing is an integral part of a company’s digital toolkit. Unlike other forms of digital marketing, organic is not owned but earned. As a result, it doesn’t require you to pay to get your brand in front of your customers. And organizations are waking up to the importance of SEO.

Conductor, one of the world’s leading organic marketing platforms, asked hundreds of top marketers about their organic programs, from headcount to process to technology. Their responses were then analyzed to answer critical questions that will lay the foundation for organic marketing strategy in the coming years.

Here are the major highlights of the report.

1. The Impact of SEO/Organic Marketing Programs on Website Performance in the Past 12 Months

A vast majority of the surveyed companies saw improvements in their website performance due to their organic efforts. Most of them saw an improvement of 5% on average and very few of them saw their performance going down due to their organic marketing strategy.

This is strongly linked to maturity as 90% of the companies with advanced organic maturity levels saw a minimum of a 5% increase in performance due to their efforts. Enterprise companies were much more likely than mid-market companies to witness an increase in performance.

2. Comparison of Marketing Budgets to that of 12 Months Ago

There has been an increase in the organic marketing budget in the last 12 months despite the global pandemic and economic uncertainty caused by it eventually. The effects were even more significant for higher maturity organizations.

66% of high-maturity companies saw some degree of positive impact on their team budget in 2020. On the other hand, less than 12% of low maturity companies saw a positive impact.

3. Expectations Regarding the Future of Organic Marketing

The survey found that the future of organic marketing was bright on multiple fronts. Both the executives and the practitioners are equally bullish about the growth of organic marketing over the next year. Practitioners and marketing leaders agree that they’ll be able to achieve their ability to meet team goals over the next year. SEO executives are particularly bullish with 72% saying that they feel adequately prepared to achieve their goals.

88% of the surveyed companies are also confident that they’d be able to enhance their ability to achieve goals in the coming year.

4. Collaboration Between Roles and Teams

Cross-functional collaboration can play a key role in eliminating duplicate efforts, surfacing lost information, and coordinating strategies. However, there’s a lot of room for improvement as far as collaboration between the content team and web developers is concerned.

Content teams found web developers to be highly collaborative just 24% of the time. This pattern plays out in the inverse as well with SEO and web developers finding employees in content roles only “somewhat” collaborative. As with other factors, people from marketing departments collaborated with SEOs only 32% of the time in low-maturity companies. On the other hand, this number stood at 94% in high-maturity organizations.

5. In-house vs. Outsourced Organic Workforce

While the difference between high, medium, and low-maturity companies was quite well-defined in most areas, there was no single correct answer when it comes to outsourcing decisions. Most surveyed companies have a mix of an in-house and outsourced organic workforce.

Only 13% of the companies went for either fully in-house or fully outsourced arrangements. However, enterprise companies were still found to keep at least half of their SEO efforts in-house.

Wrapping Up

The COVID-19 pandemic has once again laid out the significance of digital experience as in-person events came to an abrupt halt and customers turned to online avenues to find answers to questions. Thus, the significance of organic marketing can’t be overstated. Brands need to understand that the customer journey starts and ends online and for that, they need to capture billions of searches that occur every day. And that would only be possible through a well-thought-out organic marketing campaign.

To delve deeper into the findings of the report, click here.