As social media have grown in popularity, so too has the importance of building an effective social media marketing strategy. Social media has made it easy to reach people worldwide but that doesn’t necessarily translate to connecting with them. To have a successful social media strategy, it’s essential to plan meticulously, and stick to your message, even if it doesn’t seem to take hold at first. One of the worst mistakes you can make is to spend countless hours coming up with a plan and abandon it within a few days of launching it.
What brings sales in this modern era is website traffic, now we all know that their exists funnel for everything.
1000 visitors, bring 100 interested in product, 10 going through the options, 1 converts. (Hypothetical assumption based on sales track record)
So what should be done to increase the traffic? Here is what is important
1. Ads
Go for paid ads on Social media, Google Ads, Bing ads, Display ads. It is the best way to attract visitor and brand building. Of course, your website need to be strong and attractive enough for these visitors to stay, probably an incentive like discount or offer to stay. But to build the momentum paid ads are must.
There would be competition for ads as well, you need to find the best and appropriate keywords as a part of your strategy and the efforts would pay off.
2. Get Social
While ads are one aspect, brand also need to be social not just social promotion but actually basing content to market on social media. Twitter is ideal for company/product updates and announcements. YouTube is for Video marketing. LinkedIn is ideal for employer branding and B2B leads.
Optimizing content for search engines is valuable and is never going to die. Creating internal backlinks, website submission, etc are not dead and shall never be.
3. Experiment with content
What works for your competitor might also work for you is a wrong assumption. Business’ that are in same area of operation and selling same products also at times change the way they communicate.
4. Start Guest Blogging/Also invite guest posts.
Developing guest posts on reputable site helps build brand reputation and increase traffic. I wouldn’t recommend to spam by means of guest posts, but take individual approach on each website where you intend for guest post.
Bringing in authors from outside on your niche blog also helps build the reputation. As these individuals are likely to share the article in their network, social site, etc.
Posting on LinkedIn helps brand with their traffic spike, LinkedIn has become more than just Employer branding site and with many changes in pipeline it will be the center of communication in coming years.
6. Link Internally
Backlinks to your websites should not only come from outside, but also from internal pages. Do not miss the opportunity to back link the pages – This not only helps with SEO, but also results in a better, more useful experience for the user – the cornerstone of increasing traffic to your website.
7. Don’t Neglect Email Marketing
Businesses focus on new ways to attract customers, they forget the traditional approach, 100′s of businesses still work towards it and generate good revenue through its results. Key is to understand the psyche of subscriber. How efficiently we showcase what they need to see and subtly embed our product to sale will change the results of Email marketing.
8. Responsive and fast website
Website browsing happening through PCs is history today more than 70% of traffic comes from tablets and mobiles. This changes the dynamics of the website drastically. Ensure that the website is accessible and can be comfortably viewed across devices.
While being responsive isn’t enough the website also has to load fast to reduce the deflection rate of visitors.
9. Comment
You visit many websites for your business research, using the comments to initiate conversation about your business could be a good thing.
It wont immediately give you traffic, but providing insightful information in comments can subsequently result in traffic. Here, I am not recommending spamming with links on unrelated websites.
10. Check analytics
Visit google analytics and check the data, keep close eye on traffic source, demographic of visitors, etc. Use this information to target and promote content. Pay attention to what posts and pages are proving the most popular. Inspect visitor data to see how, where and when your site traffic is coming from.
11. Communicate with Videos
Videos is the flavor of the season and is here to stay for sometime, it is ideal to invest in video for the product, as it is the best way to grab – and hold – your audience’s attention, and boost traffic to your website at the same time.
12. Competitors check
Keep a check on your competitors strategy, about what they are communicating their adwords target, etc. You can check what your competitor is doing with tops of websites,
13. Participate in events.
Irrespective of your industry, it is ideal for you to be part of your domains events, conferences, networking meets, etc. Attending these events is a good idea – speaking at them is even better.