How to get (the right) traffic to your website – the data-driven way!
The cornerstone of your marketing strategy is RELEVANCE. You need to get the right message to the right audience using the right platform at the right time.
There are a number of proven ways to acquire leads and sales and the most common way is to send or attract traffic to your website where you can convert this traffic into leads or sales.
Not all traffic is equal: some traffic is useless and will never result in conversions while the traffic you want is highly targeted and primed for purchasing.
The right message
Relevant messaging will resonate with the target audience from the moment they see your ad, video or post right through to the sale.
The right audience
The massive advantage digital marketing has over traditional marketing techniques is the ability to find the right audience for your product, and for people to easily find your product that will solve their problem.
The old techniques of billboards on the highway or TV or radio advertising have one major downfall: you’re paying for a very broad audience who may not be relevant to your product offering.
Digital marketing channels allow you to find people most likely to buy your product. You’re able to target based on age, location, interests, lifestage, career and many other factors. When you combine these you can find the perfect overlap between your ideal customer and your target audience.
Search engine marketing (through paid search and SEO) puts your product in front of people who are actively searching for a solution to their problems and who are therefore primed to buy.
This differs from the traditional marketing methods where you interrupt people and sell to them.
Yes, there is still a place for these broadcast, spray and pray methods but they are generally better suited to products that appeal to a general audience (toothpaste for example) and to create awareness. The right audience for a toothpaste company is virtually everyone, but the right audience for a company selling shrimping nets is niche.
Digital marketing makes it easy to find the niche audiences most likely to buy your product.
The right platform
Where should I spend my marketing budget? There are many choices but right now the most popular are Google Ads, Facebook Advertising (which includes Instagram) and LinkedIn Ads.
You need to advertise where your audience is and right now people are heavy users of social media and Google platforms like Google Search and YouTube.
Not all platforms will work equally well for your product or service and you will need to run small test campaigns with low budgets to see what works before you scale up.
For most people this will mean running ad campaigns on:
- Google Paid Search
LinkedIn advertising has a higher cost per lead or sale but could result in really good quality leads because of the very specific targeting options available through the LinkedIn advertising platform.
Other platforms to test advertising include Pinterest and Twitter.
If your objective is to create product awareness but not necessarily direct leads or sales, then consider investing in Google Display, YouTube and Facebook awareness campaigns.
Digital advertising easily outperforms TV, cinema, print, radio and billboard/outdoor advertising channels. Google, Facebook and other social networks have developed extremely powerful algorithms to capture attention and make their platforms addictive through notifications, infinite scroll and other dopamine-inducing mechanisms which is why digital advertising has the largest share of attention in any period of human history, for better or for worse.
We advertise where the attention is. People’s attention is on their mobile devices and far less now on radio, TV (does anyone even watch traditional TV anymore?) and print media.
The right time
When you advertise is important but my approach is to have an always-on approach to digital marketing. Your MESSAGING will change depending on the season, time of year, holidays or other significant events.
Gone are the days of prime time slots for TV advertising – with paid search people will find you when they need to.
You should be aware of seasonal trends in your niche though – some months traffic or conversions will increase substantially due to the affects of holidays or other seasonal factors. Keep your eye on trends and you can predict future performance.
Filling the top of the funnel
The top of the funnel is the first part of the customer conversion process and where you will implement different tactics for acquiring customers.
The main drivers of contacts, leads or sales are:
- Paid advertising campaigns that lead prospects to sales or landing pages that are optimised to convert
- Create product awareness and how your product can solve their problem
- Drive traffic to your website or leads from a lead form
- Capture the person’s contact information or drive sales or both
- Content marketing: videos, blogs, articles, newsletters and social media posts that appeal to people in the research part of their journey
- Address the solutions to their problems
- Provide information to help the decision
- Receive their contact information or drive sales or both
- SEO (search engine optimisation): gain high rankings in Google organic search to get targeted, high-intent traffic to your content or product pages which then result in contacts, leads or sales
- Affiliate marketing: third parties who promote your products or services in exchange for commission on the sale
Quality of traffic
Simply getting visitors to your website is not enough – you need high-intent, qualified traffic that has a high probability of converting into a lead or sale.
The quality of your traffic is measured by the probability of that traffic converting into sales.
People could be coming to your website simply because you have a highly entertaining video or useful piece of content published and not with the intention of buying from you.
Every piece of content and web page you publish should be commercially driven. You need to ask “how will this result in a contact, lead or sale?” before you click the publish button.
Keep an eye on seasonal traffic – sudden spikes in traffic might not be due to great ad performance but may be from organic traffic sources which increase seasonally.
The beauty of digital marketing is that you can set up dashboards and alerts to monitor traffic and identify spikes and trends with enough time for you to react to them. Historical performance is often a predictor of future success, so you really need to be on top of what your website traffic and quality of traffic looks like over time.
What do you think?
What are your thoughts about how to attract the right traffic to your website that will convert into leads and sales? Let me know in the comments below…