Companies of all stages, sizes and industries share one essential requirement for growing or staying profitable: acquiring new customers.
To get the most bang for your buck, let’s look at some best practices for attracting the right kind of visitors to your site. The first thing to do is decide which channels are best for growing online revenue. Consider focusing your efforts on the following activities:
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Affiliate marketing
- Social media marketing
SEM, affiliate programs and social media marketing are three of the most effective ways to get your offering in front of as many eyes as possible. While you may already be utilizing these tactics, here are a few quick tips for maximizing your efforts.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM leverages a massive network of search engine services to drive visitors to your website. It primarily involves two components: organic search optimization (SEO) and paid search ads (PPC). To succeed with both SEO and PPC, it’s critical to keep keywords in mind. First step is to perform keyword research. Once you know which keywords are resonating with prospective customers, here’s how you get to work.
To drive organic traffic through SEO …
Create dedicated pages on your website rich with content that focuses on those keywords. This is a great opportunity to explain how your offering addresses your prospective customer’s pain-points and helps them overcome challenges.
To drive paid traffic through PPC …
Write display ads that use the same keywords to attract prospective users. Make sure you’re defining your audience appropriately, otherwise you’ll run the risk of paying for clicks that don’t yield leads of revenue.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliates earn commission by referring their visitors to your business. Strategic affiliate partnerships boost your site traffic, brand recognition and overall revenue. What’s the key to building a successful affiliate network? It’s pretty simple. You and your affiliates need to have the same (or very similar) target markets. For example, if you’re aiming to boost sales for your cloud backup service, you should partner with sites that promote and review products in that specific industry.
Examples of those types of sites include:
Coupon sites | Download portals | Blogs | Review sites
Visitors to these sites are interested in learning more about the type of product or service you’re providing. Therefore, they’re significantly more likely to click through affiliate links and convert.
To form affiliate partnerships, you’ll have to offer competitive incentives for your affiliates. Reward your affiliates with commissions for free users who convert into paying customers. These commissions incent affiliates to keep your brand in front of their audience, creating a win-win situation.
Social Media Marketing
According to research by Deloitte, 75 percent of Americans online say that product information found on social channels influences their shopping behavior and enhances brand loyalty.
The first step for social media success is investigating where your target audience is most active. While creating profiles for your brand on all major social sites is a good idea, you don’t need to be active everywhere — focus on the networks that benefit your business the most.
Measuring the ROI of social media is notoriously tricky – but metrics are key to a successful social strategy. Here are some measurable goals for social:
- Increased referral traffic to your site
- More qualified leads generated
- Boosted online revenue
- Higher average order value
- More reviews and feedback left by customers
Less easily measured, but still useful:
- Increased company credibility
- Boosted brand awareness
- Better quality customer feedback
- Clearer corporate identity and culture
- New channels for customer service interactions
- Increased media attention
Keystone
Creating a plan to generate traffic is vital to having a successful business — and your best bet is a multichannel approach. Every business requires a custom mix of channels like SEM, affiliate marketing and social media. Strategize, monitor and refine this mix in order to boost the number of new users visiting your site and joining your customer base.
For further insight into attracting and acquiring new customers, check out our latest ebook: What Does It Takes To Acquire New Customers?
Ryan Greives is the Public Relations Manager at cleverbridge.
