Your Guide to Buzz-Worthy Organic Marketing in 2026

Organic marketing is the undisputed queen of low-cost, high-reward marketing when it's done well. However, in recent years, it’s felt like a moving target. Five years ago, everyone was trying to build their brand's podcast; now, everyone is talking about how to get their brands to show up in LLM answers.

While trends come and go, one thing remains constant: The brands that knock organic marketing out of the park understand their audience and are able to rise above trends to genuinely entertain, educate, and inspire.

In this article, we’ll cover the foundations of organic marketing, how to use it in conjunction with paid media, and tips for building and refining an organic strategy over time.

• What is organic marketing?
• How does organic marketing compare to paid media?
• The most popular organic marketing tactics
• What are the benefits of organic marketing?
• Some common myths about organic marketing
• The basic steps of planning an organic marketing strategy
• Organic marketing metrics that matter
• Getting started with organic marketing in 2026
• FAQs

Organic marketing is an umbrella term for marketing that naturally brings attention to your business. It’s often used to describe marketing that doesn’t rely on paying for people to see your brand.

While its ultimate goal is to get your business more customers, it takes a less sales-forward approach. Instead, it focuses on establishing your brand as one to trust.

Organic marketing takes time and skill to work, but when people do start coming to your business organically, the conversion rate is often higher than from paid media. They also keep coming long after the work is done, unlike paid media, which stops generating results once it’s turned off.

Under the umbrella of organic marketing, these are some of the most popular practices.

• Search engine optimisation (SEO)
• AI overview optimisation (AIO)
• Content marketing (blogs, long-form articles, guides)
• Brand building (positioning, messaging)
• Video content (short-form video, webinars)
• Podcasts (either launching your own or joining others)
• Social media content (not ads)
• Community building (events, Slack channels, responding to DMs)
• Email marketing (newsletters, lifecycle emails)
• Public relations (PR) and earned media coverage
• Influencer and creator collaborations
• Founder-led content and personal branding

While we listed AI as a separate ‘function’ of organic marketing, it is being used in all of the listed jobs. This could be as light as using AI to clean up the sound in the back of a podcast or as heavy as using it to craft a first draft of a social media post.

Remember that the foundation of organic marketing is being an effective communicator, so we recommend using AI in a way that helps you amplify your brand's voice, rather than replacing it.

Organic and paid media work together. If your business is fairly new or has a small marketing budget, starting with organic marketing is a cost-effective way to get new customers. However, it can take longer than paid options that guarantee your brand will be in front of new customers.

That’s why they work best together. Paid marketing captures immediate demand, like appearing in search results when someone is actively looking for your product. Organic marketing plays the long game, creating new demand through awareness and building trust over time.

A simple example is organic marketing bringing people to your website through SEO, then paid marketing reinforcing that interest later through retargeting ads. There are endless ways you can combine the two disciplines to get better marketing results.

Here’s a quick comparison between the two to help you understand their core differences.

As we’ve covered, organic marketing encompasses a large number of disciplines. We recommend focusing on building up one or two functions at a time. The goal is to do a few things well, rather than trying to do everything at once.

Here are a few of the popular (and more effective) tactics to use in your business.

Content marketing is the star of most organic strategies. Simply put, it is creating and sharing content for your audience. This can include written content, video, audio, webinars, or any format that helps do the following:

• Educate: Explain how something works, why it matters, or how to do it.
• Inform: Share updates or insights to keep people up to date.
• Inspire: Show what’s possible by sharing examples or offering a new opinion.

Many of the categories below could be considered a part of content marketing.

SEO is a skill set that some content marketers have. It is the practice of creating content that Google or other search engines prefer and will then serve to people in the search results.

There are lots of tips and tricks that marketers use for SEO, such as choosing relevant keywords, including related terms naturally, adding helpful page elements like image descriptions, and structuring content so it’s easy for both people and search engines to understand.

There is also a more technical side to SEO. For larger companies, you may need developers to manage this on your website. However, for small to medium-sized businesses, most content marketers can fix anything that’s holding your site back in search results. This often involves mapping a clear site structure and improving the loading speed of your pages.

In 2026, SEO also means optimising for AI-driven search experiences. In this new world, it’s all about clearly answering people’s questions and building site credibility.

Strangely, some businesses think of social media as a softer form of marketing. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Social media marketing is one of the most challenging organic marketing channels because you can’t optimise your way to the top. Instead, it involves being acutely aware of your audience, each platform’s ‘hidden’ social rules, and showing up consistently, even on days when you’re fresh out of ideas.

Being on social media also means community building, like responding to comments, engaging with other people’s posts, and replying to DMs. Over time, a recognisable brand voice and point of view make your content easier to remember.

Social media is all about momentum, so your first months (or even years) of posting might feel slow. However, as your audience snowballs, you’ll start to get more and more out of social media.

When you are doing organic marketing, it’s important to find ways to capture people as leads so you can market to them via email. This can be done by getting them to provide their email to join a webinar, download an ebook, read a report, do a quiz, sign up for a free trial, and more.

Once you have their permission to email them, you can continue to nurture the relationship with ongoing emails. You don’t want to be emailing them every day, but it’s important to have a cadence, like sending a monthly newsletter. For organic marketing, newsletters should actually be interesting for people to read, not sales pitches.

For example, if your product is for amateur cooks, your newsletter could include recipes, cooking trends, an opinion piece on a viral cooking video, a note from a chef people admire, or a poll that you’ll share the results of in the next edition.

All of these give people a reason to keep opening your newsletter and build trust over time. As that trust grows, your brand starts to feel like a credible authority on the topic, which makes people more likely to choose you when they’re ready to buy.

Earned media (when you publish something so great people can’t help but share it), partnerships, and collaborations extend your reach through borrowed trust. Being mentioned in the right publication, partnering with brands that share a similar ethos, or collaborating with related creators, introduces you to new audiences in a credible way.

It also helps to gather reviews and request case studies from your customers. You can then use these to build trust and help people feel more confident choosing your brand. Reviews, referrals, and customer advocacy all act as social proof, showing potential customers that real people have had positive experiences with your business.

Zero-click content is content designed to deliver value immediately, without requiring someone to click through to your website. This includes things like AI overviews and in-feed social posts, where people get the answer or insight right where they are.

In practice, this means clearly answering common questions, summarising key ideas, or sharing practical tips in a way that search engines and social platforms can surface directly. While this type of content may drive fewer clicks, it still plays an important role in increasing your brand's visibility.

If you are looking to grow your business over time, you will need some form of organic marketing. A tiny proportion of businesses are lucky enough to be able to grow exponentially through word of mouth (still an organic kind of marketing), but 99% of businesses will need to invest in doing it themselves.

Here are the top benefits you can expect when you start doing organic marketing.

• Long-term brand recognition: When your brand shows up with helpful, relevant content, people remember you when it’s time to buy.
• Compounds over time: Unlike paid campaigns, organic content keeps delivering value long after it’s published, building momentum instead of resetting.
• Higher trust and credibility: People tend to trust brands they discover through education, recommendations, or consistent presence rather than ads.
• Lower cost in the long run: While organic marketing requires upfront effort, it doesn’t require ongoing spend to maintain visibility.
• Better audience insights: Organic channels create two-way interactions. Comments, replies, and engagement can all help you understand what your audience cares about.

Organic marketing is often misunderstood because it’s not as straightforward as paying for ads and getting eyeballs. Due to this, many teams approach it with assumptions shaped by paid media, which can lead to unrealistic expectations.

Here are some common myths about organic marketing, debunked.

Organic marketing isn’t free. While you’re not paying for clicks, most businesses still invest in experts or an agency because it takes time, skill, and consistency to do well. Costs can also include creator collaborations or paying professionals to produce things like photography, video, or other creative assets.

Organic marketing takes time. SEO and content often take several months to gain traction, and in many cases, closer to a year to show consistent results. The payoff, however, is that the content will continue to bring you new customers for a lot longer.

Blindly following trends is how brands blend in, not stand out. If you do choose to lean into a trend, it needs your own perspective or twist to be effective.

There are absolutely ways to measure organic marketing, but it’s not simple. For example, someone might read a blog, follow you on social media, join your newsletter, and only convert months later. This makes attribution more complex.

Organic social media is hard. It takes creativity, consistency, and a strong understanding of your audience to build momentum over time.

Writing blogs isn’t enough. You need a strategy, a clear understanding of what your audience wants to read, unique perspectives, and an SEO strategy. Even great content won’t get read if people can’t find it.

This couldn’t be further from the truth, as currently 88% of B2B websites are discovered through unbranded search. SEO has evolved, not disappeared. In fact, clearly answering questions and building credibility is more important than ever in AI-driven search.

Email remains one of the highest-performing channels. In fact, we found that 65% of customers say they prefer to communicate with companies via email. In practice, organic marketers still consistently see email driving conversions. It also plays a separate role in nurturing people who may return later when they’re ready to buy.

TikTok has more than a billion active users and is quickly becoming a serious discovery and shopping platform. Shoppable video is already available in the US, where people can buy products directly on TikTok. This model is expected to eventually roll out in Australia, so now is the time to start building a presence on TikTok so you’re ready when it arrives.

Sadly, when it comes to connecting with your customers, there’s no universal formula. Organic marketing works best when you understand your unique audience, experiment creatively, and focus on genuinely delighting people. On top of this, 89% of marketers say they need to continually innovate to remain competitive, as what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow.

If you’re completely new to organic marketing, there are a few things you’ll need to do when you are getting started.

Our first tip is to be realistic about what success looks like. If you’ve done any organic marketing before, use that as your benchmark. Also, remember that organic marketing takes time, so early goals should focus on signals like more people searching your brand name or steady growth in website traffic.

Learn about who you’re speaking to. The better you understand your audience, the more relevant your organic efforts will be. Organic marketers should be doing customer interviews and consuming the other media their audience reads.

You don’t need to be everywhere. Focus on the channels where your audience already spends time and where your team can realistically show up consistently. For B2B brands, LinkedIn or Reddit can work well, while B2C brands may be better suited to TikTok or Instagram.

Consistency and quality matter more than volume. Try to only commit to things your team can keep up with and build a simple system you can sustain, rather than relying on one-off ideas or bursts of activity.

Publishing is only half the job. Make sure your content is actively shared and reused. Link to it in other posts, get your employees to share it on LinkedIn, or pay to have it featured in a publication to extend its reach.

At the end of each month, lay out all your content in one place with the key stats attached. Look at what performed well, what didn’t, and then discuss why. From there, create a simple list of dos and don’ts for the next month. Use this guide to double down on what worked, and stop spending time on the things that didn’t.

While it’s not always straightforward to attribute new customers to your organic marketing, there are some metrics you should keep an eye on. Here are the metrics organic marketers should know.