It sounded like another marketing buzzword at the time, but our VP of Marketing knew what she was talking about when she told me I’d be perfect for it.

For all of my career, I’ve been focused on the intersection between content and growth. I’ve been a content marketing manager, growth marketing manager, growth lead, SEO manager, and the list goes on.

But after running ads at an agency, I started diving deep into both Google and YouTube SEO. And I realized the power of organic marketing.

Not having to pay for ads to get customers? Sign me up!

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for ads when you have a great offer and want to scale it.

But there’s something so special about organic growth. If you’re like me and you love reaching an audience organically, and you consider yourself a “51% business, 49% creativity” person like myself, this article is for you.

I’m going to go over five of my favorite organic growth marketing strategies and tactics that I’ve used throughout my career. All the way from working in-house at startups, to running my own media company, and doing client work with SaaS companies.

But first, let me clear some things up.

What is organic growth in marketing?

In marketing, organic growth is the practice of launching marketing campaigns that drive qualified visitors to your website without spending money on advertising. This can mean SEO, content marketing, word of mouth, social media, product growth loops, and more.

Essentially, it’s all about your owned media, with a little bit of earned media mixed in.

In other words, it's about leveraging the resources within your company to drive user growth. So things like company-generated content, user-generated content, the types of features you launch, and the way you interact with customers — all of this affects your organic growth.

You’ll learn my tried and true methods below. But first, let’s go over the why behind our organic growth marketing efforts.

Benefits of organic growth marketing

Investing in organic growth for your company is important if you want to help lower your CAC (customer acquisition cost). If you have a well-balanced marketing channel mix, chances are things like paid advertising, influencer marketing, and affiliate marketing will drive up your CAC.

Leveraging organic channels like SEO, email marketing, or even push notifications for apps, can help lower your overall cost to acquire a customer. Here are some other benefits:

• Running more financially lean. Ad costs keep going up. And yes, investing in content is not cheap if you want to do it right. But in the long-term, having an organic growth MOAT is going to put you ahead of your competition which relies solely on ads. Don’t be at the mercy of ad platforms.
• Builds a strong brand. Ads can be distributive. If you really nail down your organic growth marketing, it means people resonate with your content and trust you — in turn, building up your brand reputation.
• More sustainable growth. Creating an organic growth engine can act as a flywheel for your acquisition efforts. They’re usually slow to get ramped up, but once you have a steady flow of website traffic you will sustain your traffic for a long time (if done correctly). Growth begets growth.

Alright, now let’s go into some tried and true organic growth marketing strategies. These will be in no particular order. And I know some are going to sound simple. But trust me when I say there’s a strategic way to approach each one that a lot of marketers don’t do.

5 proven organic growth marketing strategies for 2025

Here are my top organic growth marketing strategies:

1. Editorial SEO (outside of just Google)
2. Creating growth loops in your product
3. Programmatic SEO
4. Email newsletters
5. Strong customer service

Alright, let me talk about each one with examples.

1. Editorial SEO (outside of just Google)

When people hear SEO (search engine optimization) they immediately think of Google. And that’s with good reason. Google owns well over 80% of the market share when it comes to search engines.

But what people also forget is that YouTube is the second biggest search engine. And with the rise of SearchGPT, ChatGPT may be a close rival.

Now when I say “editorial” SEO I essentially mean creating content. In the growth world, this is often referred to as CGC (company-generated content). This is the content your business creates that is designed to be found organically in search engines.

For example, when I was at Webflow, we leveraged both Google and YouTube SEO to create content. For Google, we had a lot of blog posts that targeted search queries our ideal customers were searching for at every stage of their buyer's journey.

I wrote an article on the SaaS content strategy I used for this you can check out here.

The idea is simple: Figure out what people are searching for related to your product or service and create great content that’s designed for humans and search engines to read.

I’m not going to go into too much detail on the content SEO side of things here because I already have blog posts on this topic. Here are a couple you can check out:

• How to write SEO blog posts
• Editorial SEO: The ultimate guide to growing from content

And what I’ve come to notice is that if you follow white-hat techniques for driving organic traffic to your website from Google, you’re going to naturally show up in ChatGPT and other AI chatbots as well.

ChatGPT is the second biggest traffic driver for both my website and my client's sites right after Google.

But don’t just stop there.

People have trust issues. And with AI-generated content on the rise, those trust issues are getting worse. People want to buy things from people they trust. And in order for people to trust you they first have to like you.

I’ve found, as it pertains to organic content, that YouTube is the best place to do this.

For example, I rank pretty well for the term “saas website” in Google. So, I went out and created a YouTube video around this same topic — optimizing around the same keyword.

I followed proper YouTube SEO and user engagement signals to the best of my ability. And just five days later, the video got over 1,000 views and ranks #2 for the target keyword. That’s some powerful stuff.

Besides just creating content for your blog and YouTube channel, there’s also another way to drive traffic to your website organically that’s more scientific (for all you growth nerds). I’ll explain that in the third strategy.

But for now, let’s get into the second strategy which is one of my favorites.

2. Creating growth loops in your product

In 2019, I took a class from Reforge called Growth Series. At the time, it was in person and I was living and working in San Francisco. It was an amazing experience, and the main thing I took away from it was that the biggest companies grow from loops, not funnels.

A lot of times, people view this as word of mouth. And this diagram explains that concept:

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But there’s actually a way to “manufacture” this word of mouth. And I have two examples I want to go over. One was revolutionary for its time, and the other is how I actually found out about a product I use today.

The first one is Facebook.

Back in the mid-2000s, Facebook realized there was a psychological component to a real social network. People love to see what others are up to and crave social validation. The way Facebook organically grew really fast was through the concept of adding friends.

Things like “mutual friends” became small but key product designs that tapped into people's primal desire for connection.

You see this today with a lot of consumer apps — asking to integrate with your contacts lists or some sort of list of friends.

The core takeaway is that, for certain products, your customers are your greatest marketers. Of course, this only works if you have a product so good people want to keep using it.

The second example is the newsletter platform, beehiiv.

When beehiiv launched, they raised money from a lot of different creators that were already writing on the internet. That was their first growth loop. Getting their initial customers to be influential people with money. The incentives were strong here. Investors with already big newsletters would start using beehiiv as their newsletter platform of choice — giving beehiiv the opportunity to send thousands of emails from the start by leveraging their investors. From there, beehiiv created a “Powered by beehiiv” button in the footer of each email sent from their platform.

This is how I discovered the platform. I was reading a newsletter from a big investor I follow and I saw the button at the bottom of the email.

It was absolute genius — grow while getting paid to build a company.

This simple growth loop has allowed beehiiv to grow really fast from the start. I’m pretty sure many people have learned and used beehiiv simply because I use it for my own newsletter too.

So now it’s your turn. Think about ways you can incentivize your existing customers to become your best marketers. This way, the growth output can be reinvented as the input — creating a growth loop.

3. Programmatic SEO

Next up is programmatic SEO. Although, I like to think of this one as UGC (user-generated content). Unlike editorial content, where you go out and create the content, programmatic content is when your users create the content for you.

Now this is not always the case that UGC = programmatic SEO — it’s just my favorite way of doing it. I’ll show examples of each.

For example, when I was on the organic growth team at Webflow, one goal we had was driving SEO traffic programmatically through the Webflow Showcase. In Webflow, people can post their projects in a public showcase for others to check out (and even clone for some).

We had so many websites published to the showcase but no efficient “container” for those sites to be categorized and found via search engines.

My manager, an engineer, and I sat down and mapped out all the different categories a website can fall into — from portfolio, agency, SaaS, etc. Basically any and all classifiers.

The good thing was that all the sites that were already published on the showcase had category tags, we just didn't have pages to organize them.

So we created hundreds of landing pages based on each tag. We also made sure each one had great on-page SEO and the interlinking structures were super clean.

And just like that, every time someone submitted a site and tagged it properly, it would reflect on the appropriate page. The more people posted to the showcase, the more the respective landing pages would populate with content — and the better they would rank over time.

Basically, our users created the content of the pages for us. We just had the responsibility to make sure there was a properly optimized container that each UGC item fell into.

This is very similar to how Upwork grows as well. The more freelancers that join their platform, the more Upwork's respective landing pages for that type of service work grow.

Now, this is the UGC programmatic SEO route — wow that’s a lot of nerdy buzzwords.

The other way to do programmatic SEO is to have a large dataset at hand and create a bunch of landing pages that auto-populate with that dataset. It’s essentially the same thing we just went over. But I want to show you an example of a company that does this would having user-generated content.

That company is Zapier.

Zapier gets a ton of traffic from SEO. And while 90% of it is literally editorial content from their blog, they still get over 114K visitors per month (according to Ahrefs) to their programmatic app page.

This is very much a product-led SEO approach but it works so nicely into their programmatic growth engine.

At its core, Zapier is like a “glue” between different apps. So if someone wanted to find an integration for something like Google Sheets and Webflow, they might search just that — “google sheets webflow integration”.

And one of the top-ranking articles is a programmatic landing page from Zapier on this exact search intent:

According to Ahrefs, Zapier has over 70,000 of these app landing pages — mapping two different brand names together: [app/brand] + [app/brand] + integration.

It’s a genius approach to organic growth marketing because not only is it leveraging programmatic SEO, but it’s also leveraging brands of already existing products.

Similar to how beehiiv leveraged popular investors with an audience they could reach, Zapier leveraged brands with an already existing reach (just in a different way).

4. Email newsletters

Next up is email newsletters. You might not think of this as an organic growth strategy, maybe more of a content marketing approach, but you’d be surprised how well this not only complements your other marketing channels but also how it can drive organic traffic.

When I first started my newsletter, I had a hunch that if I can create a newsletter people love, they will forward certain editions to their co-workers and friends. And I had this hunch because I did so myself with other newsletters I was subscribed to.

And, yep that’s exactly what happened.

Every time I send a new edition of my newsletter that really hits with my audience, I immediately see a spike of new subscribers and I can see they came from a forwarded email. This is sort of a growth loop. Albeit a hard one to predict, but still a growth loop.

But that’s not the only benefit.

I’ve noticed that in seasons where I don’t send my newsletter, the SEO traffic of my website kind of plateaus, and I also get a lot fewer mentions on social media from people talking about my brand.

When I start to get consistent with the newsletter sends, I see people talking about the newsletter on social media and I get a slight lift in SEO traffic (especially to pages where I link out to in my newsletter).

I guess luck is created when you actually do stuff.

A newsletter, or really any email list with engaged people who trust you, is a powerful asset for your marketing efforts. It creates a flywheel across SEO (because Google likes websites that get traffic from different mediums) and brand mentions (word of mouth) across the web.

It also adds to your owned media efforts — which is huge when it comes to building a sustainable organic growth engine.

So ya, start a newsletter. But make sure it’s a good one people actually want to read. Otherwise, there’s no point in creating content for content's sake.

5. Strong customer service

This one might surprise you, but I’ve experienced it firsthand.

Why do people continue to use the same tech products? It mostly revolves around this concept of joy. The best products in the world give people a sense of joy. Generally, people don’t use products they have a bad experience with (unless they’re forced to for work).

And even so, sometimes people may have a negative experience when using a product they’ve been using for a long time. This negative experience can be so bad that it forces them to churn and tell everyone they know about how bad their experience was.

This almost causes negative word of mouth.

But if you can win someone back after a bad experience, oh my you will have a customer who is going to love you even more than your average “easy” customer who never reaches out to your customer support team.

In other words, great customer service leads to retention. And retention leads to more people talking about you.

And strong retention is the foundation of making organic growth marketing work for your company. All the extra things like writing blogs, making YouTube videos, sending emails, etc. is just the fuel you put into the car.

But your retention is your engine. The stronger the engine, the more it’s going to use your fuel efficiently. In typical startup terms, you won’t have a “leaky bucket” — which is a reason why many startups fail.

I say this because just this past summer I went to Portugal. And I got an Airbnb. Up until this point, I’ve had some questionable experiences with places not being advertised as they were listed and I was debating on going the Airbnb or hotel route.

I decided to be a loyal customer and chose Airbnb.

And then, I had the worst Airbnb experience of my life. The place was not as advertised and the neighborhood was really scary — someone was breaking into the building next door as I was pulling up into my parking spot.

I left the Airbnb, booked a hotel, and contacted Airbnb support for the very first time.

I explained the situation and without hesitation they:

• Gave me a 100% full refund
• Paid 20% of my hotel bill for the week
• Sent me a free gift in the mail

This bad experience turned into a great experience. And the next time I was looking for a place to stay, I went straight to Airbnb.com.

And I’m even talking about their brand right now because of the impact it had on me.

So don’t overlook this part of your organic growth marketing strategy. It’s arguably the most important one.

Conclusion

Organic growth marketing is my favorite form of marketing. It’s what I love helping SaaS businesses with, what I love learning about, and what I love talking about.

I’m not special or the smartest marketer out there, but I have done a lot, worked with a lot of different companies, and experimented a lot. And I’ve found that creating a holistic organic growth marketing strategy sets a strong foundation for all of your marketing efforts.

It keeps the lights on during economic downturns and helps you build a strong brand that people love (when you do it properly). And when it’s time to scale and crank up that user acquisition, adding paid ads as more fuel makes your already efficient engine run even faster.

If you’re interested in more organic growth and just general marketing knowledge, consider subscribing to my newsletter — it’s completely free. Happy marketing!