The Resilient Base of Organic Revenue Is the Most Important Thing to Build. Here's How.

Going from a brand wholly dependent on the short term revenue driven by our “direct response” ads —> to a brand where the vast majority of new customer acquisition came from owned and organic traffic sources is what got us acquired. But for most of the life of the business, I had no idea what that meant.

That misconception led me to completely ignore what became the most important part of the business - the resilient base of organic revenue that became as predictable and resilient as SaaS subscription revenue.

So you don’t waste as many years as I did ignoring the most important part of your business, here’s what I learned and two actions you can take today to increase the resilient base of revenue coming from owned and organic channels:

What exactly is it?

Mistake: I used to think new customer acquisition coming through owned and organic channels or traffic sources (also referred to as revenue coming from “unpaid” channels) was purchases that came from marketing stuff we did that didn’t fall into the ‘paid’ bucket.

Early on in the business, that was basically nothing, so I thought to myself, “welp, that’s not for us, we’ll just focus on what we can control, measure and optimize, which is getting people to click on our ads and buy."

Lesson: I learned I was dead wrong. When I learned the definition, the specific customer behaviors that drive it, and what caused it, it was a game changer for us.

Definition:

** It means we spend dollars (or non-dollar resources) in a way where the purchase does not happen when someone clicks our ad, it happens because we've impacted the way people think to the degree that when they are in-market for our product, they subconsciously choose our brand. This then shows up in our metrics as increased revenue from people who search for our brand or come directly to our site, which is referred to as ‘owned and organic traffic sources'. **

Action you can take: See if your marketing team is aligned on that definition.

Visually, it shows up as the black line in the image going up - consistently - over a long period of time.

Action you can take: Look into what your graph would look like. Would it look like what's in the picture?


What can you do to increase it? How can you 'change minds'?

The quote "the brand that gets remembered is the brand that gets bought" can be a helpful guide here.

Mistake: I had the assumption that we had to start doing all these different things - things we had no experience in (like making fancy TV ads).

I was wrong there too.

Lesson: I learned we could make progress building this resilient base of organic revenue without changing what we were doing.

For instance, we didn't have to immediately stop doing direct response. We could just start experimenting with different creative within the campaigns and ad sets we already had that support the idea that the brand that gets remembered is the brand that get's bought.

Action you can take: try it.