One of the most basic, but often challenging aspects of marketing a small business involves driving potential customers to your website. The reason for the emphasis on “potential customers” is that your business can certainly do a number of things that involve simply driving eyeballs. The question that has to be considered, however, are the relevant eyeballs – the audience of individuals who can buy, or would potentially be interested in the products or services that you offer. That part is a bit harder because it involves finding the right audiences and getting them to commit. Here are 5 steps that we hope can set your fundamentals for improving your website traffic.
Step 1: Start with keyword and audience research.
The old cliché about marketing is still true: It all starts and ends with your audience. Regardless of the business you’re in, you had to at least somewhat understand that potential market in the first place in order to create certain products or services. We’d suggesting getting back to those roots when it comes to your marketing as well. What challenges does your audience face and how do you help solve them? What are those keywords they use? What solutions or pain points are they solving for? How are competitors getting their traffic? If you can figure that out ahead of time and with some precision, you can start developing certain personas with distinct characteristics. How do you find this data you need? Try the following:
- Do keyword research on core terms. Start with free tools such as Google Ads Keyword Planner. (Sign in to any gmail account on ads.google.com, then navigate to Tools & Settings/Planning/Keyword Planner). You can do volume searches by different geographic regions or local areas. Also, you can get ballpark data on how much keywords costs if you were to do advertising on Google. Other paid tools have more information as well, including competitive data and various analyses for both SEO and SEM that can help you:
- Look at Google Analytics data. If set up correctly, there’s a wealth of information here about your current audiences, including where they’re coming from to get to your site, what pages they’re reading, what products or services they’re buying, geographic area, and a lot more. If you need help gaining access to better analytics, give us a call and we’re happy to have a free consultation about your needs.
- Call your customers. We always recommend that clients pick up the phone and call their best customers. A few questions you can ask them:
- How did you find out about us initially?
- Where do you go on the website?
- What are everyday challenges you face in terms of how our products and services help?
- What are those challenges and struggles you have in general?
- Conduct an online survey. We recommend working with a research professional so you don’t bias results. But if you want to know more about psychographics – those core emotional areas that drive people such as their loves, ambitions, challenges and fears – a survey is a great option.
Step 2: Based on the audience research and keywords, develop relevant content.
First, we’d suggest following our 5 Content Marketing Rules for Any Business:
- Rule 1: Start with your audience challenges (which we conveniently covered in No. 1.
) - Rule 2: Develop a content plan.
- Rule 3: Set a tone and approach, and test it.
- Rule 4: Develop a SEO workflow.
- Rule 5: Distribute it, track it, and measure it.
- Rule 1: Start with your audience challenges (which we conveniently covered in No. 1.
)
Developing relevant content in this context really means deciding on an approach that will help you answer your audience challenges and needs. Before you start down the road of deciding the type of content (a blog, a video, a whitepaper etc.) we recommend you first develop your plan. The plan should dictate your tactical next steps, including what voice/tone you want and your content style. For example, what’s the best way to help your customers? Are you providing:
- Thought leadership/social currency
- Practical content
- Stories for audiences to consume
- Emotional content to move people toward your brand
- Triggers (that which you establish in the minds of a customer that helps connect a concept to your brand).
- Examples of people using your brand (social proof).
At Marketing Nice Guys, we try to provide a few different content styles: practical or helpful content (what we hope this piece is), storytelling, and social currency for our small business audience. Once you decide on your approach, you can then figure out the vehicle (blog, video, e-book etc.) that best delivers your message.
Step 3: Improve your site SEO.
So, in addition to content, one way to obviously drive more relevant traffic to your website is to come up higher in search results for those terms you’ve researched that are important. Many clients ask us, how to start a SEO initiative. Well, we’ve laid out the basics in The Five Steps of SEO for Small Businesses. The five steps form our PATIO framework and full-funnel approach to digital marketing:
- Planning & Strategy
- Approach (for content)
- Tools & Tactics
- Implementation
- Optimization
We often say that when doing any SEO initiative, it’s important to pay attention to detail. That means after you’ve created the plan and decided on the content approach and have your tools and workflows in place, you have to implement your plan well. In other words, you have to do the little things on the page and off the page to be successful. We often say, it’s one thing to know SEO but it’s another thing to actually do it. Good SEO takes work and that means the little things, whether it’s paying attention to your headlines on the page, your topic model, your title tag, or even small things such as the alt text on photos. If you need a reminder about what to do, download our free SEO checklist here.
Step 4: Buy Selected Paid Media Ads
As opposed to SEO, which is a form of pull or inbound marketing, small businesses can also drive traffic to their website by engaging potential customers with outbound marketing in the form of advertising. One thing to remember here is that not all media or advertising opportunities are created equal. Also, much depends on the type of business you are and your goals. To help you decide what’s important, we’ve laid out the 7 Things to Consider Before You Buy Ads for a Small Business.
Indeed, as outlined in the above article, many small businesses turn to social media as it tends to be more inexpensive than other forms of paid media such as Google or television advertising. With more and more social platforms limiting the reach of organic posts (and with small businesses generally starting at lower follower levels anyway), we often recommend that clients test small media buys first and see how they perform. For example, for just $50 on Facebook, you can certainly get in front of a few thousand targeted users of the platform by boosting some content posts and see if you can get additional traffic and clicks to your website. These small tests do three things:
- They allow you to test your content relevance to a targeted audience that’s bigger than your actual social following.
- They allow others to discover your content feed and social presence.
- They allow you to track user behavior from that social platform (at least to a certain extent) to your website, where you can see what other pages and content they are interested in.
As we would recommend to any client, make sure you know what you’re doing before you buy ads on your own. Although Facebook, for example, is relatively straight-forward compared to say a Google Ads, to do it well still involves specialized knowledge. And it’s easy to waste money. If you need help, feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to provide you a free consultation to look at your specific needs.
Step 5: Get more people “on your list” and send more email/mobile alerts.
Sometimes small companies forget that the best, most qualified traffic actually comes from customers that have already bought from them (they can buy again in many cases) or those who have engaged with them enough to get on their email list. And yes, you have to figure out how to drive people to your website to do that. But that doesn’t mean that once they’re on your site you can’t figure out a good way to acquire them as part of your audience funnel strategy. What many small companies do is figure out how to target those that they can engage on the website with content downloads, newsletter registrations, webinars, or other middle funnel acquisition tactics – primarily so that they can stay in front of such individuals on a regular basis through email.
Once you’ve acquired people to your list, one thing we often recommend small businesses do is send more email. Some retailers, for example, send a couple emails per day to their customer lists. Why? Because email converts and has been shown to have the best ROI of any marketing channel. (The frequency by which you email your various audiences will depend on your industry and the willingness of your customers to engage, of course.) Email is also one of the best drivers of incremental website traffic. That’s why acquiring the right individuals is so important. Again, to help you in this area, we’ve laid out the 5 Biggest Mistakes You’re Making in Email Right Now.
It’s not just email lists either that you should think about for distribution. Do you have an app? Or, do you have permission to send SMS texts to mobile phone customers? If so, consider reaching out via mobile notifications, especially for deals, discounts, sales, or other big campaigns you might be running as a business. Such alerts keep you top of mind for potential customers and can drive additional traffic to your app or mobile web presence.
Conclusion
These are not the only ways you can drive traffic to your website. There are certainly many more but the ones outlined above are those that most small businesses have the means and the competencies to develop and do well. At Marketing Nice Guys, our mission is to help you excel in digital marketing. That means if you need additional help, we’re here to provide you a free consultation. Email us at contact@marketingniceguys.com or call us at 703-609-7091. We want to wish you good luck in all your marketing endeavors.
