Organic Marketing Strategies with Abbey & Courtney from Duo Collective

 

Are you constantly struggling as an introvert to bring clients to your business? You are showing up online and hustling just to get that next client, but it leaves you feeling overwhelmed. If that’s how you feel, then a great strategy to incorporate is organic marketing. This allows you to bring traffic directly to your business over time without using paid advertising and showing up all the time. If you are still somewhat new to your business, this is a great way to bring it back to the foundations of your business and grow your audience. Let’s explore organic marketing further and how it can help bring warm leads right to your business.

Our guests on the podcast today are Abbey Oslin + Courtney Petersen. They are co-founders and business besties of Duo Collective, a boutique organic marketing agency specializing in social media strategy, branding, SEO, and coaching for small business owners and creative entrepreneurs. We are obsessed with finding ways to help you grow organically without needing to spend a dime on paid ads.

In this episode, Abbey, Courtney, and I dive into:

• How Duo Collective co-founders  started their partnership after working together at the same marketing agency 
• Using organic marketing as a powerful strategy for introverts 
• Writing quality content for blogging in your business 
• Overcomplicating SEO +  how to understand it for your business
• …and much more

 

 

How a Partnership Was Born From Working Together at a Corporate Marketing Agency

Abbey and Courtney were on their own career journeys before their paths crossed. They worked at the same corporate marketing agency but were in entirely different departments. Abbey was on the accounts side of working with corporate clients, and Courtney was on the design side. That was until they began working on the same team for their company’s events and things like that. 

While working full-time at the marketing agency, both Abbey and Courtney were looking for a side-hustle or opportunity to explore their passions. Abbey connected with a travel blogger, where she began doing some travel blogging and learning SEO or search engine optimization by writing content. Courtney was doing some freelance design work for local and national clients. They both had these opportunities to explore new things but never really saw it working as an entrepreneur on their own – separately. 

Once they began working on the same client account’s at their corporate job and for company events mentioned above, did they realize that they worked well together. They even became friends outside of work. A natural progression formed from them working great together where they finally had that ‘ah-ha’ moment of doing what they were currently doing for corporate clients, but for small businesses and passionate entrepreneurs to help them grow their own businesses as a team. This opened the door for discussion when a client landed in their laps who wanted more than what each of them had to offer, so it was the perfect time to test this partnership and see how it worked. After several late nights, sharing tacos and conversations, they officially partnered up and became Duo Collective.

 

Why Going the Organic Marketing Route is a Powerful Strategy for Introverts

When these business besties started their business, they solely focused on organic marketing for their own business. They were passionate about growing businesses organically and marketing in a way that doesn’t require you to pay to see results. There has been this idea in the online business community that marketing is all about paying for ads and other ways of marketing your business, but that’s false. They like to focus only on the organic marketing side of things, especially helping newer entrepreneurs grow their businesses by building solid foundations instead of paying for advertising, even though it also has a time and place.

If you don’t start by building your strong foundation before using ads, you don’t have a clear goal in mind for what you are paying for. Basically, you are throwing money up in the air and hoping a sale lands for your business. So if you don’t have that foundation or the strategy for paying for those ads, they’re most likely not going to work for you anyways. Before you get to that point, Abbey and Courtney want to ensure you have the ideas, the content, and the strategy behind why you’re paying for ads.

Marketing nowadays is such a jargon-filled word that the co-founders have people coming to them all the time saying they aren’t ready to market their businesses yet. People don’t understand that you market your business every day by sharing it at networking events, on social media, sharing a blog post, or in several different ways. Marketing is confusing to people, but anytime you publicly share your expertise with anyone or just talk about your business, that’s marketing. It doesn’t have to be a complex or complicated concept. You can do many different things when it comes to marketing your business; those things don’t have to cost money.

 

Writing Quality Content When It Comes to Blogging

The first thing you should know when writing content for blogging purposes or any marketing purpose, you will suck at it. Everyone does when they start something new. It will take practice to begin seeing results, but if you constantly tell yourself that you can’t be a good writer, you never will do it and be able to improve. If you are also fearful about being a quote-unquote ‘horrible’ writer, you should start absorbing other people’s content and noticing what they are doing and how they are breaking it up. 

It will take practice to write better social media content as you become more familiar with what to say. A copywriter friend of Abbey and Courtney’s has a great tip to help you improve. She mentions that you should imagine the person you want to write to in your head. Instead of writing to a random audience, pick a person like a client or any other real person with a name and write your content for them. Start writing your content as if you are speaking to them and teaching them the topic at hand, and it will become much more manageable than writing for everyone on the internet.

Another thing to notice is that you may be overcomplicating things, too. You don’t need to know big words to seem more intelligent or to talk in a specific way that is above how you usually would speak. The best thing you can do is to stay true to your brand voice and be authentic. The people you want to connect with want to hear about you personally, so those are the people you write for. Let your true self shine, and don’t try to be fake with your speech or in the way you write. Don’t let the process of writing be complicated anymore. Bring things back to the basics.

 

Overcomplicating SEO + How to Understand It Better for Your Business

Are you confused and worried about how to apply SEO to your business? The big thing that Abbey and Courtney focus on with clients and their audience is that SEO is just a jargon-filled word that needs to be talked about like any other technical process like the algorithms of Google and social media. Yes, those things are complicated, but that doesn’t mean how we do business with SEO has to be just as complex. What you can do is imagine what your audience is typing into Google to search for, and that is what you should be writing about. Then, you want to use those exact words on your website. Don’t just fill your website with pretty, fluffy words just because it is fun; you want Google to tie you to the person searching for you using those keywords. Even if you aren’t ready for keyword research, you can take a step back to start understanding your audience. 

What problems do they have? 

What solutions are they looking for?

Who are they trying to work with?

Start creating your content around that because you will naturally begin to see some growth from an SEO perspective just by thinking that way. That’s how we should think anyways about running our business. You forget that the algorithm is made for people. You shouldn’t be blogging for Google, but instead for your people, and then naturally, the magic happens and lives within there, as long as you’re writing content that people are looking for. 

 

Using Instagram as Your Organic Marketing Social Media Platform

Instagram is such a visual platform to market your business on, which is why many people are geared towards using the platform in that way. The platform is ever-evolving and used to be about beautiful images and beautiful content mixed together, but now it is shifting into more video content, making it harder for introverts and people, in general, to wrap their heads around.

Instagram is great for putting your content out there for your audience, but one of the more significant pieces for Instagram is that connection piece. A lot of people fail to remember that Instagram is a community. You’re supposed to be connecting with people, obviously sharing your content, services, and products, but also making sure that you’re showing up authentically and making these connections with those people. That’s what’s so powerful about the platform. 

One of the struggles on a platform like this is that you feel comfortable marketing on it. But, still, you’re losing the opportunity to repurpose that content in other places where you might attract clients or a different audience. So it’s essential to change your mindset around this to remember that you should be repurposing your content on other channels for marketing your business at these different touch points, not just focusing solely on Instagram.

Abbey and Courtney have given some super beneficial tips and insights on all things organic marketing for your business, especially for introverted entrepreneurs who don’t want to show up online constantly. So don’t forget to use the resources mentioned below to connect with Abbey + Courtney and get more organic marketing tips.

 

 

If you haven’t already started incorporating any of the organic marketing methods mentioned above, which one(s) do you plan to add to your marketing strategy? (Blogging, Pinterest, Email Marketing, etc.)

 

A Breakdown of This Episode

[1:34] Abbey + Courtney’s backgrounds working at the same marketing agency and how they went on their own as co-founders of Duo Collective

[9:18] How to utilize organic marketing as an introvert to create a powerful marketing strategy

[14:52] Blogging as an organic marketing method and how to write quality content

[18:00] Overcomplicating SEO + how to better understand it for your business

[25:25] Introvert struggles with Instagram + using it as an organic marketing method to bring clients to you

[34:28] How to connect and work with Abbey + Courtney from Duo Collective

 

If you enjoyed this episode, I invite you to drop a five-star rating + review with your biggest takeaway, so that other introverts can find this podcast for guidance and support through their introvert entrepreneur journey!

Download the Episode Transcript

 

 Resources Mentioned in the Show

• TheTaraReid.com
• Join the Introvertpreneur Club
• Grab My Free Resources
• Programs I Offer
• Sign Up For One of My Courses
• Coaching Services
• Shop My Digital Products
• Done-For-You Content Kits for Service Providers
• Facebook  
• Instagram
• Duo Collective on Instagram
• Duo Collective Website
• Duo Collective Marketing Services
• SEO on Tap Course
• Duo on Air Marketing Podcast
• How Strong is Your ‘Gram Quiz