Get Customers Online - Step 1 - Traffic

Every business, whether B2B or B2C wants to get customers online. While many businesses cannot sell directly online, they can still start the sales process online and directly attribute a sale to their website.

If you want to get customers online, you first need to attract them to your website! This seems like a simple objective, but there's more to do than just use pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic.

Who Are Your Best Buyers?

All of your marketing will be more effective if you can really hone in on WHO you are marketing to. Not just demographically. Who are they as people? What makes them tick? How do they research problems and find solutions? Why do they work where they work? What makes them happy both at work and in life?

Knowing these details about your best buyers will allow you to identify your buyer persona(s). This is a VITAL step in building high quality traffic to your website and ultimate get customers online.

The Right Kind Of Traffic

Piggybacking on your best buyers, you don't want just any traffic to your website. You want to drive the right traffic. The right traffic spends more time on site. They take the actions you want them to take and they ultimately become customers.

I can't reiterate enough that it's better to have 1,000 high quality visits per month than 10,000 garbage visits per month. By garbage visits, I mean people that land on your site and bounce immediately because it's not at all what they were looking for. Or people that simply have very little chance of taking the actions we want them to take.

Increase Traffic & Get Customers Online

Assuming you've done the work necessary to identify and document your buyer persona(s) and their buyer's journey, you have several options for increasing traffic to your website.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

The overall outcome of a solid SEO strategy is continued improvement in how your website ranks in the major search engines for high-value keywords that drive traffic to your website.

How do most buyers, B2B or B2C, start looking for a solution to their problems? SEARCH ENGINES!!!!!! If you answered any other way, it's time to gain a better grip on the world's current reality. I don't care what industry you operate in or where your customers are located. They are searching for answers to their problems online.

Showing up in search results for valuable keywords should a top-priority in your marketing strategy. That means your website needs to be highly optimized for search engines. You want to make your site is as easy to index by Google, Bing and others as humanly possible, and have an ongoing strategy to measure and improve.

Some website or marketing firms may try to tell you that all you need to do is install some Wordpress plugins, and you're good to go. Kindly thank them for their time and immediately run the other direction. SEO is not that simple. If anyone tells you that it is, they are not the consultant you want to work with.

Search engine optimization involves technical aspects of how your website is built, the volume, type and quality of your content, off-site aspects such as inbound links and social media activity and your website's reputation and longevity. What's more, these are just some of the easier aspects of search engine optimization.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Hopefully you aren't scrolling right past this section. If you do, you are going to miss out on a tremendous opportunity to advertise in a high-ROI way. PPC advertising is an excellent way to drive traffic to your site while your SEO is taking affect. Because SEO can take some time (which is well worth the wait) to work, PPC can fill the gap.

Pay-Per-Click advertising can be done in search engines and social media. Because you can target your ads very specifically to the right audience, you are able to minimize wasted clicks and see a positive ROI in a relatively short period of time.

A PPC advertising agency like ours can help to minimize your cost per click, while optimizing the keywords that your ad appears for. It's often quite helpful to have someone there to make sure you're using the best practices and spending as little per click as necessary. Our involvement would also make sure you're not wasting your clicks by sending them to your homepage or some other non-converting landing page.

If your ultimate goal is to get customers online, you should really consider using PPC to drive extremely high quality traffic to your site.

Content Marketing

A great way to get new customers online is to use content marketing to reach them at each stage of their buyer's journey. There are endless formats for content marketing, but some of the commonly used content marketing formats include:

• Blog posts
• Checklists
• Whitepapers
• eBooks
• Videos
• Webinars
• Step-By-Step guides
• Infographics
• Email campaigns

These are just some of the options you have with content marketing. When content marketing is high value and distributed effectively, it can have a huge impact on the traffic that visits your website.

Content marketing also helps to establish a key ingredient to any sale, TRUST. By making a connection with your best buyers at an early stage of the buyer's journey (.e.g, awareness stage), you are helping to build trust before the buyer even knows what their true problem is or how to solve it. That goes a really long way toward making a lasting connection that leads to a sale.

Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIN, Instagram, etc... they are all potential tools for generating high quality traffic to your website. As mentioned above, most of these networks have PPC options, but you can also use unpaid techniques to drive website traffic.

It's really important to understand that not every social site will work for your specific industry, product or service. It's important to have a strategy for each and test what's working and what's not. Invest more time in higher-return social networks, and maintain a less aggressive strategy for lower-return sites.

Social media is a great distribution tool for your content marketing. By building a community or getting involved with already established communities, you can create a network of associates that see the content you share and hopefully become engaged.

To Get Customers Online, You Need Traffic!

There's no way around it. A site with no traffic or really low quality traffic will simply not produce new customers for your business. Attracting the right visitors to your website is step 1 in the Inbound Marketing process and needs to be a consistent priority. It will be very evident and rewarding when the quality and volume of your traffic increases and you start to see new business come as a result.

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