Nobody likes talking to an empty room. Don’t launch a new website without having these essentials that drive targeted customers to your site.

There’s a surge of excitement that rushes through you when you launch a new or freshly designed website. The possibilities are wide open. You know there are literally millions of potential buyers out there and you’re a few clicks away from taking over the world. Then, you finally launch and realize — oops. You didn’t have a plan in place to drive traffic to your newly designed website.

By now, you understand that there are certain things that you can do to drive traffic to your website: social media ads, Google ads, email marketing, and SEO just to name a few. But these are crucial pieces to your online sales and marketing puzzle that many small businesses don’t implement wholeheartedly. So what’s holding your business back from driving a ton of website traffic?

A Killer Content Plan

Your website is your hub of everything – but you need to draw people in. Creating engaging content that people want to interact with is the key to a successful marketing strategy. Find the stories in your brand – this can come from your customers. It can come from creative ways your product fits into the everyday life of consumers. It can tell the story of how your product or service improves your customer’s lives. In every business, there’s a story that can be extracted. It just takes some creative brainstorming and investment to bring these ideas to life.

Once you’ve got your story to tell, it’s time to think about what that looks like. Is it centered on a video or video series? How can you extract even more content from your video series? Will there be blogs, photography, memes, and other smaller video clips? Creating a killer campaign means diving into the nitty-gritty details.

A Social Media Advertising Plan Aimed at Helping Your Business Grow

Social media is absolutely essential for all different sizes and types of businesses. This is especially true if you’re in a competitive market space and need to stand out among your peers. Once you’ve got a great content strategy and mapped out the stories you’ll tell, it’s time to start running social media advertisements.

Set aside a budget specifically for social media advertising. There are two types of ads you should run on an ongoing basis: awareness and sales-driven.

The primary goal of an awareness campaign is to increase your company’s visibility within your target market, and the metrics you’ll use to measure success will include things like video views, reach, engagements, etc. You can do this by simply boosting posts or running video view ads on YouTube or Facebook and Instagram.

A sales-driven campaign’s goal is to increase sales or generate leads and/or phone calls. You can create specific campaigns that measure the number of calls, clicks, and conversions. But always remember: you should the proper tools and applications installed to effectively monitor and analyze how your advertising campaigns affect your business.

An Explosive Email Marketing Plan

If you’ve got a solid email list, you absolutely need to continue communications with your customers. This shouldn’t always be sales-driven communications, but perhaps helpful and informative articles, videos, or even entertaining topics. Make sure you’ve got a consistent schedule to stay in front of your customers and keep your brand at the top of their minds.

If you’re looking to build your email list, it’s important that you put things in place on your website to incentivize users to give up their email address. These things can be engaging pop-ups, opt-ins during checkout, or getting more creative with things like giveaways and sweepstakes.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There are thick books on SEO, and for good reason. Climbing the search engine rankings take time, and there are so many varying factors that affect your search engine position. For the sake of keeping things simple, let’s break down some of the key components of basic SEO:

• Refresh Your Website Content. Keep your blog active, update your product descriptions whenever you upload new products, swap out your home page images and content. Google rewards websites that are updated.
• Make Sure Your Products Have Meta Tags, Meta Descriptions, Images with Alt-Text, and Descriptions That Are Optimized for Search. Search engines can’t read images or videos. The meta tags, meta descriptions, and alt-text help search engines understand what the content is from a technical standpoint. On the consumer-facing side, it’s always good practice to make sure your products are accurately described using the tone and personality of your brand.
• Make Sure You Claim Your Online Profiles. Google My Business, TripAdvisor, all social media, and beyond, it’s a good practice to make sure each of your profiles is thoroughly completed and include updated links to your website.
• Get Good Press Coverage Online. When other credible sites write about you and link to your website, this helps with your search engine ranking! Hiring PR for a specific product launch, or placing news articles will spread the word about your business, drive more website traffic, and add credibility to your site.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

For some businesses, advertising on search engines like Google or Bing may not be a great fit. For many businesses whose customers are actively searching for their products or services online, it’s perfect. Make sure you enlist the help of a digital strategist to help set up and build your campaigns. They’ll be able to identify which search queries people are using to find your services or products to create a campaign that generates the results you’re looking for.

Create Your Strategies, Then Act!

It’s important to create plans that align with your brand, are creative, and cater to what your audience is looking for. But beyond planning, you’ve got to act! If you’re strapped on time (as most small business owners are!) then hire the help you need to drive the results you need for growth.

‍We know that you’re busy because running a business is time-consuming. Why not pay the experts to do this for you? From an exceptional content strategy to creating, running, and monitoring your ads, we have you covered.

Contact us today for a consultation!