Although there is little we can do about others misusing and these words, I’ve decided to create my own new buzz phrase: strategically organic.  Most of you are probably thinking, a) isn’t that an oxymoron or b) what the hell are you talking about?  It is an oxymoron but I’ll explain why at Pakmode we have adopted a strategically organic approach to market our events.

In marketing, the term organic means letting things happen naturally.  For example, if you deliver the best product or service, people will organically market your brand for you by telling their friends about it.  The problem lies within the idea that people will tell other people right from the get go, especially in smaller niche markets.  The reason people begin to talk about a brand, product or service is usually because of an experience or relationship, that customer has with a brand.

These days, being part of something cool and exclusive will make people “re-tweet” your message, or if you’re a band…post your song on their wall before any one of their friends has done so.  Within niche markets specifically, it’s important to be strategic and pack the snow tight, so that when the snowball effect takes place you’ve built a solid foundation of your message.

Building things organically always gives the best results, but sometimes you need a little push in the right direction.  Recently, Pakmode put on the 4^th annual Renting 101 event at Eastern Michigan University.  This event is in a very small market and with the date of the event close to finals, it was important for us to have the students market the event for us.  Here was our approach:

1)      Use Facebook event to promote the details and message of event

2)      Create a giveaway that will get people talking and naturally have a buzz

3)      Allow people to enter contest prior to event by posting in their Facebook status “I’m going to Renting 101” but to enter they had to tag our event

We had a good marketing plan in place, but before we could expect other students to post this message for us, we needed to get the ball rolling.  To help us implement this marketing plan we have an unfair advantage to others by way of our brand evangelists acting as a digital street team. This is the birth of strategically organic marketing for every event we host.  It was important that other students who saw them post the message felt that it wasn’t a promotion but instead just a friend of theirs finding out the next cool thing, which in this case was the opportunity to win a free 1 year lease.  So behind the scenes, we knew it was important to jump start this promotion to go viral within our niche market, and that’s how strategically organic marketing was born at Pakmode.

Obviously some of the success from this promotion was due to the fact we had a GREAT giveaway.  But we actually found that most students thought this was a scam, or just too good to be true.  After learning this from our post event market research last year, we knew that if the message delivered to students came from their peers, they were much more likely to believe in it.

If you do try to implement a strategic organic marketing approach for your event, brand, product or service here are a few things to keep in mind:

1)      Make sure your message isn’t a promotion or ad, rather than the beginning of a conversation.  Especially when dealing with Gen-Y, it’s important to remember they are very dubious about giveaways and freebies.  It’s not your typical, get a free t-shirt for signing up for a credit card anymore…it’s more about building relationships and trust with your end user.

2)      Once you get the ball rolling…let it roll on its own.  The whole point to strategic organic marketing is to jump start the organic part so that it eventually does exactly what you want.  Think of it as an energy drink for your marketing plan!

3)      In the words of one of the greatest musical marketers of all time R. Kelly, “Keep in on the down low.”  If your audience finds out that you have structured this entire operation, you just became the devil in their eyes.  With that being such a high risk, understand that high risk always yields high returns if executed properly.

The best example I could find of a company being strategically organic comes from one of my favorite marketing teams I know of at Bank of Ann Arbor.

However you choose to start your next strategically organic marketing campaign, just remember it all starts with relationships.

We had a goal of 5,000 tickets and we’re so close! Just a few hundred more to go. It’s funny because that seems to be all we think or talk about these days at the office. Kevin Hart…you get your tickets? Are you going? Did you hear about the show? Did you know Kevin Hart can juggle flaming bowling pins?? Whatever or whoever we were talking to it seemed to always go back to Kevin Hart. Our Facebook and Twitter accounts must feel abused!

Anyhow, it will be nice to get back to some normalcy at the office, at least for a little bit until we try our promoter hand again. This has been, like many other things, a great learning experience for us and I’m so happy that we can be able to do what we do. 3 years ago, we sat down and started a magazine, none of knowing anything other than how to sell ads. Since then, we’ve self taught ourselves everything from accounting to web development and everything in between. We just go out and DO. Sometimes we fall on our face and we learn a lot, other times we’re successful just by acting and doing something productive.