If you website is new or has never had much traffic or never ranked really well once you have all your on-site and off-site SEO complete you will need to drive traffic to generate conversions. This is where Digital Marketing comes in. It drives traffic to your site, usually through a pay per click program with a combined effort using search engines and popular social media platforms to target your demographic.
Once you have all of these things complete you’re ready to focus on marketing.
When your website and all of the associated accounts are finally set up and complete you want them to pay off. You’ve invested a lot of time and money in that and you need it to drive conversions, whatever that is for you. It can be getting leads that your sales team needs to follow up with or it can be e-commerce and online sales. But you’re not going to get to the front page right of search engines away so you have to spend money on getting traffic to your new site. That is PPC or Pay Per Click.
You need to invest in SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and PPC (Pay Per Click) to drive traffic to your site. The most well known is Google Ads, Bing Ads and other social media ads like Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram and others are important for targeting specific demographics.
To maximize your ROI you need to have inbound marketing techniques built into your site to turn visitors into potential clients. This includes conversion funnel or click funnel type landing pages and giveaways in exchange for visitor data that don’t convert. Data is what you will thrive by. You need to get their data so that you can market to them. It is an industry all in itself. Inbound Marketing solutions like HubSpot and others make it possible for a small to medium sized business to leverage the same features as a Fortune 500.
SEM is your life blood if you can afford to invest in it then Google Adwords is the 800 lbs gorilla. Bing also has Bing Ads which you shouldn’t ignore because it is less expensive and if done right, actually gets a higher conversion rate than Google albeit a lot less traffic so it is less overall sales. So if you want to see immediate results, I mean immediate, invest in a Google Ads Campaign.
PPC is advertising is just what it sounds like. You are paying to send people to your website, click by click. That being the case you do not want to take it lightly. You must have all your ‘T’s” crossed and “I’s” dotted.
When you are spending money to get people to your website you want to pull out all the stops to leverage that traffic as much as possible. This means:
There are techniques that I’ve learned working on several projects over the years in several different industries. With each project I sign non-compete agreements so that I don’t go right to their competitor and beat them out because I know what I did. This affords me the ability to see and understand things in a much broader perspective and learn the true things that breed success. There are tweaks and targets that are not obvious at first but pay off big in results. Results that get traffic to your site.
But what happens with that traffic is just as important as getting it there. If you’re getting hundreds or thousands of visit from your efforts what are you doing to leverage that traffic? That is your onsite inbound marketing techniques.
Like in this website you will find pages laid out similar to click funnels and offers for a free SEO assessment to get their contact info. If people arriving to your site don’t convert in one way, get them to in another so that you are leveraging the traffic. Give something away to get their info. If you get their legitimate info then you can reach out to them and try to convert them from a visitor to a customer. If your a tire shop give away free tire rotations. If you’re a bakery give away a coupon for a free item. Do whatever it takes to convert them in some way.
When thinking of conversions most people think of making a sale. That is right but you shouldn’t be so focused on that that you over look other forms of conversion. If a sale is your primary conversion you need to have a secondary or even tertiary means of conversion. An example would be if they don’t buy then make an attempt to capture their contact info for an incentive of something free. The tertiary would be when they click the website to leave you give them one last chance to provide their info for another incentive.
To convert them from a visitor to a customer takes effort on your part. Again, just like building the website there were all these other steps to success? Yep, now that you have their contact info you need to effectively market to them. One of the best ways is to track their movements with cookies and then you can send marketing materials directly to them bases on their surfing habits in your website. Rather than offer them 20% off on their purchase, offer them 20% off this weekend only on that widget they were looking at. And use urgency to buy.
You need to combine and leverage all the techniques, calls to action, easy to reach people, yes, people. One of the most frequent complaints are not about products but about customer service. No matter how irate the customer, treat them with dignity and respect. One bad review is seen by everyone. Make your customers happy. And then it never hurts to incentivize them to leave good reviews. See… it never ends. Lets not forget getting referrals.. and on and on…
Content is king even still. Maybe it has been proven that you don’t need 2,000 word essays to be a top ranking site anymore but you still need to have a long term plan for driving traffic. Content is how you do that. By posting relevant, current content on your site.
Blogs, Guest Posting and Skyscraping
There is no easy way to accomplish this and that is why you need to pay someone to take care of this for you that knows what they are doing. But even then you’re not off the hook. It is going to require your knowledge and understanding about your industry so you need to be an important part of the process but this is a job in itself.
Blogs – most anyone can write. You want to find a template that looks good and reuse it because once a reader gets used to that format you want to make it easy for them. Then, you crank out important info about your industry or you create it in your community.
Guest Posting – this is even more time consuming and tricky. You need to find top ranking websites in your industry that are not a competitor but are an authority of some kind that ranks high and then you want to get them to let you post on their site to provide them additional content knowing you’re going to sell your product in some way they agree to.
Skyscrape – This is a good way to rank sooner in your industry. Once you get to the front page for one things others are easy to follow. Find a top post in your industry and redo it and make it better, more informative. Then, find all the people that link to it and invite them to link to your newer, better blog.
All of this needs to be coordinated to specific landing pages where all the data we can collect about the visitors is gathered and reviewed constantly to figure out how you can improve.:
Once you have everything set up and running in your campaigns and you’re paying money for each and every click you want to know exactly what is going on with it. So every site I build is set up with Google Analytics and other software that allows us to not only see what visitors are doing but test different things out.
Analytics is a free service offered by Google that tracks your website data. Seems pretty nice right? All that free tracking from the worlds largest search engine? Make no mistake, when something is free, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT. Think of all the data they get and have access to.
But Analytics is still a great tool that can’t be ignored. You can track pretty much everything you want on your site. Who is clicking on your ads. Where are they going in the site. How long to they stay on page. All kinds of data that is helpful for someone that builds websites or is trying to get people to convert on their site.
Beyond Analytics there are applications that I use that literally show you what users are doing on your website. You can literally get a video of their screen that includes their mouse movements. You can also see how many people click what buttons. Pretty much everything you could want to know.
One of the cooler things we embark on with long term digital marketing is what is known as A/B Testing. This is where a set percentage of people arriving from say, Google, see one thing and the rest see something else. This can be the change of a color of a button or a background image. Whatever it is you want to test to see how people react to try and get a higher conversion rate.