Any business owner, marketer and entrepreneur around the world have the same two goals when launching their business – attracting more customers and generating more traffic on their websites. Naturally, every business will hit a few snags along the way, some at the very beginning and some after a successful initial run, but after a while, they all experience a plateau in both sales and traffic.
The question then is what steps to take to attract more business as this is the essential part of its growth. Whether you’re just beginning and looking for your first customer or you want to hit the goal of the 1000th customer, the idea is the same – you need to change engagement tactics and use some of the following strategies to achieve your goal.
Work on on-site optimization
As much as some people consider SEO to be heading in a downward trajectory, optimization of your content for search engines is still very much alive and well offering a valuable practice to grow your business. While some SEO tactics might be outdated and may even harm your rankings, it does cover a number of sound strategies, such as creating internal links to new content, making the most of image alt text, meta descriptions and others. Generally speaking, it’s not very time-consuming and can help a great deal in boosting your organic traffic.
A valuable SEO strategy to consider is optimizing your keywords. You need to cover popular keywords, high-intent keywords and long-tail keywords as well. The latter ones account for a great number of web searches so you wouldn’t want to miss out on that opportunity. Targeting these keywords with high commercial intent within your paid search strategy can turn out to be both expensive and fiercely competitive, but worthwhile in the end.
Be present on social networks
In general, offering great content and hoping people see it isn’t enough. It takes a lot more engagement on your part and one of the best ways of doing it is being present on social media and using these platforms to promote your goods. Twitter is excellent for short-form delivery, with effective links and a potentially huge audience. With B2C companies, the best traction comes with image-heavy platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest, with the former proving particularly effective for a number of small businesses and individuals.
However, content sharing through social channels won’t cut it – you need to be there and be proactive. Take part in discussions with relevant hashtags, answer comments by your audience and engage with your readers and interact with your fans by offering relevant and thought-provoking content.
Get advertised
Proper advertising has always been one of the most crucial parts of business growth. Effective ways of building your brand and delivering it to customers should include not just social media advertising, but also paid search and display advertising.
As part of your strategy, you should adjust your tactics to suit your objectives. For instance, both Facebook and Instagram are excellent platforms (and are now more cross-connected than ever) but to make sure you’re using their full potential, consider using Facebook Dynamic Ads and converting your personal Instagram account into a Business Account. This way, you’ll be able to bring back customers who previously visited your website and you’ll have more choices to create ads in the content format that suits your needs best.
In contrast to social media advertising platforms, what Google Ads offers is an ideal opportunity to advertise your business directly to people who are actively searching the web for them. The precise nature of the content delivery makes the experience seamless, which a recent poll by Deyan Darketing highlighted, where a large number of users didn’t recognize if the ads are paid or not. What is crucial here is that the ads are well-timed and not disruptive to users’ experience, something that Google excels at. And, as research shows, more than a third of users buy a given product within a week of searching for it.
Don’t forget that with Google, you’re putting your ads on the world’s biggest search engine along with the biggest video sharing platform, YouTube. This can be accomplished in three ways: with search ads, Google Display Network, and YouTube ads.
Be proactive
In addition to your presence in social media and an effective promotional campaign there, what can help in increasing your website traffic is offering users opportunities to learn. Webinars are an ideal way to do that, just make sure you inform them in advance, remind them in time and archive the content for later viewing.
Also, every industry organizes at least a couple of major conferences and conventions relevant to your business. It’s clever and very useful to attend these, and even speak at them, if possible. This will help you establish your position as a leader and gain plenty of exposure for your business and online presence.
Start guest-blogging
Guest blogging is still a very useful promotional tool that can help you increase your existing blog traffic as well as help you develop your brand. You also need to bear in mind that guest-blogging goes both ways – you can freely invite guest bloggers to your own site. They’ll probably share a link to their guest blogging which will direct more readers to your site. Also, consider letting established bloggers and social media celebrities feature your products on their platforms. This is a very organic and effective way of seeing a traffic increase.
With these strategies in your bag of marketing tricks, you should be well on your way to generating that buzz for your product and increasing your web traffic. It all starts with focusing on one strategy and one relevant channel, rather than using all of them at once, so you can avoid being overwhelmed. A good digital marketing tactic encompasses layering short and long-term strategies so they can work well combined. As soon as you’ve mastered one, pick the next and continue driving more traffic and growing your brand.
