The Organic Marketing Nexus: The Effect of Unpaid Marketing Practices on Consumer Engagement

Designing a digital marketing strategy that stimulates consumer engagement is vital and challenging for digital marketers. Despite previous research on this topic, little is known about the unpaid (organic) strategies of digital marketing and how they attract web traffic through consumer engagement. Based on the stimuli–organism–response model, this study examined the effects of three organic marketing practices related to electronic commerce shopping platforms, namely, search engine optimization, social media posts, and user-generated content, on consumer engagement. Covariance-based structural equation modeling was utilized to analyze 464 responses from followers of five electronic commerce firms’ Facebook fan pages. Based on the stimuli–organism–response paradigm, we found that organic marketing practices positively impact consumers’ behavioral engagement; however, consumers’ psychological engagement partially mediates these impacts. Further, consumers’ attention to social comparison of consumption dampens the positive effect of search engine optimization and psychological engagement on consumers’ behavioral engagement. The findings of this paper improve our understanding of the roles played by organic digital marketing practices in attracting consumer engagement and provide guidelines for digital marketers on how to utilize unpaid marketing strategies to attract authentic consumer engagement. This study presents a new framework in measuring the digital marketing strategies available to electronic commerce firms exploring unpaid marketing strategies.