You can have the best website in the world, but if you can’t figure out how to increase a website’s traffic –it won’t matter.
Designing a great website is a necessity given the importance of your business website. However, the work doesn’t stop once you’ve published it for the world to see. You need to drive traffic (i.e., visitors) to your website to reap all the benefits a website can produce for your business.
From there, you can build out landing pages and offers that turn website traffic into sales leads. Now, figuring out how to increase a website’s traffic is no easy task. It’s part art and part science and will require a fair bit of intuition as well.
What we can tell you is that digital marketing will be your best bet. It will allow you to leverage data-driven tactics to start driving visitors to your website. Best of all, digital marketing can fit any business's budget and makes it easy to track the ROI of your efforts. You’re likely not going to get it right the first time. Even the best digital marketers out there that run campaigns that generate no leads from time to time. It happens.
However, by being consistent in your efforts, measuring results, and continually optimizing, you will gradually learn how to increase a website’s traffic.
In this article, we’re going to cover the top digital marketing channels and tactics that will help drive visitors to your website.
First, What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is essentially online advertising. If you are wondering how to increase a website’s traffic, digital marketing is your answer. It’s the most effective way to market your business today. Why? Because digital marketing allows you to be where the attention is, that is, online.
Smartphones are the new TV. The major platforms people spend their time on when they’re online –Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. –are what CBS, ABC, and NBC were when they first launched. Only now, you don’t need to be a major brand with large marketing budgets to join in on the fun.
Any business, anywhere in the world, can use these platforms for marketing their business. These platforms allow you to spend whatever you can budget for a campaign, and then track the results so you can measure ROI.
Whether you have 100 dollars or 100,000 dollars to spend, you can make the below digital marketing strategies work for your business. The barrier of entry has completely broken down, thanks to the internet. Let’s look at some of the most effective tactics that will help you increase a website’s traffic.
Run Facebook and Instagram Ads
With Facebook or Instagram ads, you can create custom targeted audiences to run your ads against, ensure it’s in a geographic area near you, and optimize on the fly. It’s no wonder why this is often the first tactic used by digital marketers when they’re trying to figure out how to increase a website’s traffic for a client.
Now, posting organically is still a necessity. That will allow you to build an audience and boost your brand. However, due to changes in Facebook’s algorithm that favor people over business profiles, the platform has morphed into a pay to play model. Meaning, you need to invest in paid ads and boosted posts to get the most out of these platforms.
Here are some best practices to help you do just that.
Determine The Best Objective For Your Campaign
Facebook gives you several objectives to choose from when setting up a campaign. These objectives fall under the following categories: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversions.
Picking the right objective for your Facebook ad campaign is critical. It’s what the Facebook algorithm will optimize towards in the backend as the campaign is running. To ensure you reach your goals, make sure you pick the right objective.
Build Out a Relevant Audience for Your Ad Campaign
Getting your audience to convert on your offer is all about delivering the right creative to the right person. You can have a stunning ad, but if it is served to the wrong target audience –it will fail to convert users into sales leads. Ensure your Facebook or Instagram ad target makes sense for the objectives of your campaign.
If you’re looking for general brand awareness, a wide audience target with a general interest in your business or industry can work. However, if you are looking to generate leads with your campaign, look to target people who have previously interacted with your content, visited your website, or are in the middle or end of your sales funnel.
Also, look into utilizing re-marketing or lookalike audiences, which can be very helpful in generating leads.
Create Ads that Following Instagram/Facebook Best Practices
Each different ad type that you can run on Facebook or Instagram has its own set of best practices. To ensure your money is well spent, review them for each type of ad your run and make sure your creative sticks to them.
Following Facebook or Instagram's best practices will ensure your ad has a higher relevancy score which can reduce costs –although this is being phased out, and makes it more likely that your ad will be engaged with by your target audience.
Why Run Facebook and Instagram Ads?
If you are trying to figure out how to increase a website’s traffic, we recommend starting with Facebook or Instagram ads as your first paid tactic. Facebook or Instagram ads are what Google Adwords, now known as Ads, were in the mid-2000s. They are undervalued and present an excellent opportunity for businesses of all sizes.
However, that won’t always be the case. Large brands are still spending significant money from TV, Print, and Display Ads. When the next recession hits and marketing budgets get cut, they will all go to Facebook or Instagram to make their marketing dollars go further.
This is going to raise the price of running ads on these platforms. Its simple supply and demand –and there’s only so much ad space Facebook can sell.
So take advantage of this incredible opportunity while you can.
Leverage LinkedIn
The times have changed. Don’t think of LinkedIn as a place for nerds with cell phone holsters anymore. Remember those?
Since being purchased by Microsoft, the platform has transformed and is now a great place to run ads and distribute your content.
For B2B businesses trying to figure out how to increase a website’s traffic, LinkedIn has become a highly attractive yet undervalued platform. While similar in nature to Facebook or Instagram ads, this deserves its own section due to the different ad options, targeting and user base of the platform.
LinkedIn is similar to Facebook in the early 2010s in that you can get great organic results. Meaning, you don’t necessarily have to pay for ads to see much value from the platform.
However, LinkedIn also has a robust ad platform that has gotten lots of new features to keep up with Facebook or Instagram. LinkedIn is an excellent opportunity for B2B businesses whose target market is well-educated professionals. To help you get the most out of the platform, follow these best practices.
Instead of Linking to a Blog Post, Write LinkedIn Articles
LinkedIn has become a content powerhouse. Recently, the platform launched LinkedIn articles –which are mostly blog posts written natively on LinkedIn. Business professionals from all industries have started leveraging LinkedIn articles to promote their companies and build a personal brand.
As of this moment, businesses are unable to write articles, but you or your employees can. We recommend taking advantage of this tactic because LinkedIn’s algorithm favors these types of posts over blogs that link back to your site. LinkedIn and other platforms prefer content that keeps users on their platform.
That way, they can sell ads at a higher price and give marketers more data on users, which in turn leads them to buy more ads.
Post Articles/Blogs in Groups Related to Your Industry
For maximum discoverability, we recommend posting your articles and blog posts in groups related to your industry. This gives you an instant audience that is relevant to your business.
Posting in LinkedIn groups is great because you don’t need to have built up a large following to get your content out to a lot of people.
So if you are just starting, we highly recommend this tactic.
Consider Keeping Posts Short and Simple
Some of the most popular posts on LinkedIn are short posts that provide quick inspiration or advice.
The business professionals that uses LinkedIn are busy but still appreciate helpful content. Don’t be afraid to keep your posts short by including just a few sentences and an image.
When trying to learn how to increase a website’s traffic, you need to experiment. Every social media platform is different, and getting the most out of them will require different tactics and strategies.
Make Content Marketing a Priority
Content is king –but only if you do it right and have patience. If you aren’t willing to wait at least 12 months before throwing in the towel, then content marketing is not going to work for you.
However, if you are willing to play the long game, content marketing is absolutely worth it. People spend all day consuming content online. Brands need to make a mindset change: in today’s digital landscape, you’re also a media company and publisher.
To make the most of this opportunity, focus on creating the following types of content for the most ROI.
Blog Posts
Blog posts are one of the most popular forms of content marketing. That’s because they are useful in driving new business since it allows you to establish authority and build trust with your audience. They’re also essential for getting your website to rank on Google.
If you can provide value upfront to people in the form of helpful and informative articles, they will be much more likely to become a customer of yours in the future.
E-books
E-books are similar to blogs. You can easily create an e-book by running a blog series and then packaging them all together in the end as an e-book.
What makes e-books great is that you can use them as an offer to your website visitors. In exchange for their email address, they get to download the e-book and you get a sales lead.
From there, you can nurture that lead with tactics such as email marketing, so they become a paying customer or client of yours –more on that below.
Videos
Videos are the most engaged content on the internet today. Especially on social media, where posts with video have 48% more views than those that don’t.
If you have camera-friendly employees and have the necessary editing skills, we highly recommend integrating video as part of your content marketing strategy. That’s because video gets the most engagement on social media and has become the consumers' preferred way to consume content today.
It allows you to build a personal connection with your audience in a way that blogging just can’t. Best of all, they’re easily shareable, so your content has a higher chance of spreading via word of mouth.
Podcasts
Podcasts have increasingly become more and more popular, with over 50% of the US population now familiar with podcasts regularly and listeners are incredibly loyal.
Podcasts are great for those who are interested in video, but either doesn’t feel comfortable on camera or lack the production resources. Whatever the case, podcasts can be a great way to provide valuable content to your audience, especially if you know they are frequently on the go or in the car.
It’s especially great for B2B businesses, as you can interview people in your industry or go over recent news with your opinion.
Podcasting for marketing is still in the early stages, but make no mistake: five years from now, almost all businesses will have a podcast. Podcasts are the next big thing in content marketing. Try and take advantage of this before the podcast landscape becomes oversaturated.
Optimize for Organic Search (SEO)
If someone has a question related to your industry or the service/products you offer, where do you think they go? The answer is Google. That’s why you need to make it a priority to optimize your content for organic search. Organic search is simply the non-sponsored search results in Google. Ranking on Google is key to long term success for your business. Just take a look at some of these stats, via SEO Tribunal
- 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine
- Nearly 80% of users ignore paid ads in search results
- 46% of all Google searches are local
Ranking on Google is key to long term success for your business. Organic search has the potential to be a huge driver of new business, regardless of the industry you are in. By ranking high on Google, your brand is viewed as credible right off the bat
Here are some best practices to make sure your content is optimized for organic search:
- Review and implement the correct on-page SEO format for your blog posts. Doing this will get your content to rank higher on Google and ensure your efforts aren’t wasted.
- After brainstorming relevant blog ideas, perform keyword research to ensure people are searching for terms related to your post.
- Consider implementing the cluster topic model when creating blog content. It can give you comprehensive visibility of a topic on search engines and help you take advantage of internal linking.
Don’t Sleep on Email Marketing
You may think email marketing is a relic from the 90s -just like acid-washed jeans. But the truth is, email marketing remains one of the best tactics to increase a website’s traffic.
People still check-in on their inbox regularly. Moreover, if you already have their email address, they have likely had a previous interaction with your business that makes them a lead.
Maybe they filled out a form on your site or downloaded an ebook. Whatever the case, email marketing is a terrific bottom of the funnel tactic that will help you convert leads into paying customers.
Build a Subscriber List
Before you can send emails to prospective customers, you first need to get their email address.
There are many ways to do this. For starters, you should have a form field on your website where users can easily input their email address to sign up for email updates from your company. These updates can include newsletters, announcements, case studies, and blog posts.
Likely the best and fastest way to build up your email subscriber list will be to build out offers like ebooks, how-to guides, or case studies.
From there, you can offer them to your website visitors in exchange for their email address.
Segment Your Contact List
Once you have a solid list of contacts, it’s time to segment your email subscriber list. Segmentation means to divide up your contacts into groups, and then send them relevant emails for the group they are in.
Utilizing segmentation allows you to send your contacts targeted emails that make sense for where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Sending them an email that is irrelevant to them hurts your brand’s image and risks them unsubscribing from your email updates. Sending them an email that is relevant to them can help nurture that lead down the sales funnel, allowing you to close that sale.
Map Your Emails To The Buyer's Journey
How you segment your email database depends highly on the type of business you run and what industry you’re in. Not to mention your business or sales goals.
For many businesses, one of the more clean-cut segmentation strategies is segmenting your contacts based on where they are in the buyer’s journey.
To review, the buyer’s journey can be broken down into three distinct phases:
Awareness Phase: The person becomes aware of a need/want and becomes interested in learning more about products/services that can fulfill those needs and desires.
Consideration Phase: Consumers start researching products or services that can fulfill their needs or solve their problems. Here, they create a mental list of brands and start comparing them.
Decision Phase: At this point, the consumer has obtained all the information they need regarding their options in the marketplace and is ready to make a purchase.
A strong email marketing strategy will segment their contacts into those stages and deliver them relevant content straight to their inbox designed to move them to the next stage. With your brand at the forefront, of course.
Emails for the awareness phase can include informational blog posts, how-to guides, or newsletters designed to educate your audience.
For the consideration phase, you want to send them content that puts your business on their shortlist of brands. Good content for this stage includes case studies, webinars, and testimonials.
For the decision phase, you want to send them an offer or content that will close the sale. This could include product demos, trials, coupons.
Conclusion
If you want to figure out how to increase a website’s traffic, it starts with digital marketing.
Digital marketing is the most ROI positive marketing channel today. No other marketing channel allows you to target potential customers in such a detailed way.
And, no other marketing channel gives you so many different options to advertise to your audience once you’ve created a target.
