5 Best marketing strategies to grow your website’s traffic

Everyone wants more website traffic.
The good news is, you don’t need to spend thousands and employ a large marketing team to grow your traffic.

This article will show you how to do it within your budget and get real results. Let’s dive in…

There are digital marketing strategies that lift the traffic tide a little faster. No matter how much time and money we have to invest in marketing it pays to keep in mind the Pareto Principle (aka the 80:20 rule). If we invest 100% of our marketing budgets and effort in the 20% that creates the most leverage, then we can rest assured that our marketing will be effective. This is why we need to use the best marketing strategies for our business.

Before we dive into the 5 Best Marketing strategies to grow your traffic it’s important that you make sure that your marketing strategy is aligned with your business goals and that you have metrics in place to measure the progress and success of each goal. With this in place you can dive straight in, at the deep end if you like…

1. Make sure you niche your digital strategies
   Before you start creating your plan make sure you have identified the various niches that your target audience can be broken down into. For example: if you sell bags, your audience might break down into teenagers, mums, wedding goers etc. It’s important to identify each group or niche because you should ideally have a separate marketing plan for each one.
   
   By breaking your target audience into these little groups you can make your marketing more effective. This will reflect in every aspect of your marketing; your messages, your imagery, your promotions, the places where you advertise etc. For example: “Lola Bags - find the latest party trends at our new shop at the Mall” targets a different market than “Lola bags - smart mamma bags that fit everything, even your style. Teenagers are more likely to be drawn to the first message whereas mums to the second”. A generic message such as ‘great bags for any occasion’ is not likely to make any of them want to check out the store. As Seth Godin says “When you speak to everyone, you speak to no-one"
2. Line your marketing ducks in a row
   Take stock of your marketing assets. Look at your website, your content, PR, imagery, your history, your company story, etc. Take stock of what you already have that can be repurposed. Make sure that you have consistent messaging and that your Brand looks professional in all the assets you decide to keep. Pruning is very important. Get rid of all the marketing assets that are not high quality. This is the first step to up-levelling your marketing and the perception of your audience, it can move needle even by itself.
   
   If required speak with a branding professional to polish off your imagery and your taglines. Your colours need to be consistent across all your channels, from your stationery to your website and car livery. If you do not have brand guidelines, make sure you get them. This is a document created by your designers that will serve as a quality guide for all the people involved in your marketing. Your imagery needs to be high quality. It also helps to hire a photographer to get some authentic photos. Your social media audience wants to see your behind the scenes, so make sure you have plenty of candid photography to share.
3. Search Engine Optimisation
   Once you have all your ducks in order you will want to grow the number of people visiting your website. It is not possible to have instant results from Search Engine Optimisation, however if you have quality content and remain active on social media you can expect to see results in 3 to 6 months depending on how hard-working your competition is. Search Engine Optimisation is a necessary step once you have enough content because it will reduce the need to produce a lot of content all the time. Over time you will rank in search engines and also save a lot of money. You will not need to spend on Google and Facebook ads. Your PR campaigns and offline marketing will become less necessary once you start getting a predictable flow of leads from your website. It is key that you begin with SEO because the later you leave it the more costly it will become to add SEO to your marketing mix.
4. Create more marketing content
   Once you know what assets you have and the goals you want to achieve you will need to create a plan to fill in the blanks. Firstly create a weekly plan for the content you will be creating. Your main marketing content should come in the form of a blog post on your website. In today’s marketing world your website should be the hub of all your activity. All your efforts to advertise online and offline should lead to people visiting your website and then getting in touch with you for your service or buying your products. Your blog posts should be created with your audience and also search engines in mind. They should first of all be useful and valuable to your customers. If you can, it’s also great to optimise your blog posts so you can benefit from organic traffic by featuring in search engines.
5. Social Media Sharing
   The quality content you create on your website should be the basis for your social media campaigns. You should have a social media channel on every platform that your audience is active on a few times a week. (You can find this out by researching your target audience). Do not try to be too active on too many channels, often it is enough to choose one main platform and one secondary platform. Once you've chosen the platforms turn the core message of your blog posts into interesting posts. Vary your posts by turning each article into 3 types of social content. Video, Long Status Post and Image. You can also add stories to Instagram and Facebook. These give you the opportunity to truly deliver a specific message. ‘Jasmine Star’ also advocates the use of a call-to-action in stories where you ask your audience to message you. Create a weekly plan and stick to it. Your plan should contain 3 to 5 posts per week as a minimum. The main target is to share your content and get people interested in spending time on your website. The more content they consume, the more likely they will get in touch to buy your services or products.
   
   If you use these marketing strategies, especially in this order, you will get the best results. However if you do not have everything in order you can start building all of them to begin leveraging the power of content, search engine optimisation and social media marketing right away. Social media will pay off in the short term. It will help you harvest the low hanging fruit. Blog posts will help build your expert status and position your website as a valuable place to return to, and search engine optimisation will help you grow your traffic, get more leads and more regular business from your website.