7 Tools Experts Use to Build an Organic Growth Business

Some small businesses seem to grow effortlessly and naturally. How do they do it? Something called organic growth. It’s not something that just happens to your business. Organic growth is a strategy you can implement to give your business a better chance of success. Here’s how it works.

What is an Organic Growth Business?

According to the Corporate Financial Institute there are three strategies the companies pursue to facilitate organic growth:

1. Continual optimization of commercial activities, which involves how goods and services are priced, marketed, and sold
2. Reallocating funds into activities – e.g., production of high-earning goods – that fuel earnings and growth
3. Developing new models for operations or creating and developing new goods to sell and/or services to offer

BUT WHAT DOES THIS MEAN

What makes growth organic? How is does a business facilitate organic growth? Well, the opposite of organic growth is called inorganic growth, and that just means growing through using resources. More often – this breaks down to spending money on ads, marketing, and using resources to acquire a customer (for the purpose of this, we’re going to talk about customer growth).

Organic growth is what you do to grow naturally:

• A customer refers someone else – no additional marketing dollars needed
• A customer searches for “landscaping” on Google and finds you, not through an ad
• A customer cruises social media and finds a post referring your company. They realize they have the need highlighted by your company.

In all cases of the above, the customer acquisition cost is $0

Inorganic is what you do to acquire customers via resources:

• You pay $100/day to advertise on social media, leading to 1 customer.
• You pay $100/day to advertise on google, leading to 1 customer.
• You pay $100 to have an article put in a blog, leading to 1 customer.

In all cases of the above, the customer acquisition cost is $100

Did you spend? It’s inorganic. Did the customer find you? It’s organic.

Wut? I am reliant on “inorganic”. What do I do?

Inorganic is a key part of growth but you might be missing a flywheel of customers, not to mention the option to take business from your competition. Building an organic growth business will unlock a new world of possibilities.

Here’s a top list of tools to investigate to set you on the path of growing your organic presence:

• Semrush – One of, if not the best SEO tools. Compare, contrast, and even look up what your competitors are doing for organic (and inorganic) growth.
• Yoast SEO – Put Yoast on every website you have to checkout what others see when they look you up.
• Squoosh – That image that looks awesome – it’s slowing down your site like crazy. Use Squoosh to shrink your images.
• Google PageSpeed – Seriously, you don’t believe us that your gigantic image is slowing down your page? Use PageSpeed to check it out.
• Google Keyword Planner – Don’t know what a keyword is? We’re about to blow your mind. Find out what other competitors are doing to take traffic.
• Yottled – Automatically includes and populates SEO with images, links, and descriptions based on the data you input.

And a quick note on inorganic. Did you know that you can (seriously) look up every ad on Facebook?

• Facebook Ad Library – Look up any competitor on Facebook to see what they’re doing, copy, how long an ad has been active.

Is Your Business On Track for Growth?

The last one is the real trick to keeping organic growth going. How do you know when your company needs to adapt or change in order to survive? If you’re concerned you might need to adapt your services, you can learn more about how and when to pivot a business. But if you are still slowly growing your company, keeping up with demand, there isn’t too much competition to grow, and you still believe your current offerings are the best services for your clients, then hang in there. You might just be doing everything you can. What you’re experiencing is organic growth.