The Return to Organic Growth

𝑰𝒏 𝑻𝒐𝒅𝒂𝒚'𝒔 𝑾𝒂𝒗𝒆:

🌱 The shift from paid ads to growing audiences organically 
🌿 Why brands are building content that connects and compounds 
🌷 How community building is becoming a real competitive edge 
🍃 What this means for those who want to own their audience

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑺𝒉𝒊𝒇𝒕

While everyone's buying followers, some brands are growing their own.

The usual digital playbook is simple: spend on ads, game the algorithms, chase viral moments. But the smartest brands are doing something different.

I'm calling this "Digital Gardening" - the shift from paying for audiences to growing them through useful content and real community building. It’s about making content that grows in value over time, not fades.

This isn't just fancy content marketing. Digital Gardening is about playing the long game - building resources that keep working for you year after year instead of campaigns that disappear after a few weeks.

And it’s not just one industry - it’s showing up everywhere. From beauty brands ditching social media to build direct relationships, to tech wearables turning consumers into community members.

𝑬𝒂𝒓𝒍𝒚 𝑺𝒊𝒈𝒏𝒂𝒍𝒔

Owning Your Channels: Lush Cosmetics quit social media in 2021 to focus on channels they control and as a protest against Meta’s harmful algorithms, especially their impact on teen mental health. Now they have six million newsletter subscribers and 1.75 million app users. When Instagram changes its algorithm, Lush doesn't even flinch.

From Blog to Empire: Tori Dunlap transformed a personal finance blog into Her First $100K, a platform empowering women financially. She built a newsletter, podcast, and bestselling book that all work together, creating a knowledge ecosystem where each piece supports the others. By owning her channels, she's grown a massive audience that isn't dependent on social algorithms.

Product Meets Community: WHOOP, the fitness wearable company, goes beyond just selling devices. They've built forums, educational content, and live sessions where users share experiences and insights. This turns customers into community members who constantly create value for each other, reducing the need for paid marketing.

𝑾𝒉𝒚 𝑵𝒐𝒘?

Three converging factors make this shift particularly significant:

1. Social media algorithms keep changing the rules. Platforms constantly tweak what gets seen, and they favor paid content. Brands are tired of building audiences they don't really own, so they're moving to channels they control.

2. People are sick of being marketed to 24/7. With ads everywhere, consumers now gravitate toward brands that offer something genuinely useful or interesting. Digital Gardening means creating stuff people actually want, not just shoving products in their faces.

3. The quick-growth obsession is cooling off. After seeing too many flash-in-the-pan brands crash and burn, companies are recognizing that steady, organic growth leads to stronger businesses in the long run.

𝑭𝒖𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆 𝑰𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔

• Marketing budgets will flip priorities. Smart brands will spend less on ads and more on creating great content and building communities. They'll focus on keeping customers, not just getting new ones.

• Content will work harder and longer. Instead of one-off campaigns that die after a month, brands will build content libraries where everything connects and supports everything else.

• Community people will get the big bucks. The folks who know how to build and nurture real communities will become the MVPs of marketing teams, replacing the old-school growth hackers.

Owning your audience will beat borrowing one. Brands with direct access to their audiences will have a huge advantage over those depending on platforms they don't control. Smart brands are trading mass reach for focused, loyal groups—think Discord servers and private communities over follower counts.

𝑸𝒖𝒊𝒄𝒌 𝑻𝒊𝒑𝒔

🌱 Check Your Growth Sources: Figure out how much of your audience comes from paid ads. If it's more than 70%, you're too dependent. Make a simple plan to start building some audience growth you don't have to keep paying for.

🌿 Think Beyond the Trend Cycle: Before creating content, ask yourself: "Will anyone care about this six months from now?" Focus on solving problems that don't go away instead of chasing whatever's hot this week.

🍃 Connect What You Already Have: Look at your existing content and see how it could work together better. Even just adding links between related blog posts can turn isolated pieces into a more valuable network that keeps people engaged longer.

𝑵𝒆𝒙𝒕 𝑾𝒂𝒗𝒆

See you next week, same time, same place.

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Stay wavey,

Haley