Many people spend a great amount of money trying to launch their website through strong advertising campaigns; however, a lack of funds shouldn’t be a setback as there are many ways to get traffic without spending a dime. Some of the strategies utilize the social media, blogs, and emails. Here are the details.
Social media marketing. The title is quite obvious which is basically using any social media to market your website. Some strategies are as follows.
- Facebook remarketing. Facebook is a great promotion tool whether you’re in the B2B or B2C industry. But did you know you can set up remarketing audiences on Facebook? By installing a Facebook tracking pixel on your site you can continue to market to customers who have visited your site. This is a great way to create return traffic to your business blog or website. And you can start remarketing to audiences as small as 100 visitors.
- Facebook email custom audiences. Staying with Facebook, you can also give that email list of yours a second life. Instead of just using it to blast emails to your customers once in a while, you can upload that list into Facebook and capture the social accounts of anyone that has their email address attached to it. This is a huge benefit since it will allow you to market to those users on their mobile devices.
- Twitter remarketing. Twitter remarketing works in almost the exact same way as Facebook remarketing. Simply install the pixel and you can now target your sites visitors on Twitter. The main difference is that Twitter will require a higher minimum audience count before you can start advertising towards them, 500 people to be exact.
- Twitter custom audiences. Just like Facebook, you can target Twitter users on their mobile devices by uploading their emails into Twitter. However, if you cannot get at least 500 users into your custom audience through an email upload, then you won’t have the required minimum to advertise towards them.
- Twitter Cards. Twitter Cards is a great tool to drive traffic to your site. They are larger tweets that incorporate images and allow you to have buttons built into the tweet. They allow you to have engaging calls to action, attractive images right in the stream, and you can even give them special functionality like having downloads attached directly to the tweet. Tweets with images get 18 percent more clicks than its text counterparts, so make sure you’re using Twitter Cards.
The blog is another useful tool to drive the traffic to your website. Blogging really does drive traffic. There is experiment done by Convirza that test in increasing blogging frequency and the impact is increased significant traffic within months.
- Promote your blogs on Facebook. You may have heard that Facebook has cut back on their organic reach. This means that almost no one will see your social media posts on Facebook. Instead, you need to put a little bit of budget behind them. A good strategy is to have a campaign constantly running that is featuring your blog posts and target that campaign towards your custom audience and remarketing audience as described above.
- Exchange blog posts with other sites. Syndicating your blog on other sites is a great way to drive new audiences to your site. A great way to do this is to search for blogs that are in a similar industry as you and that is in a similar situation in terms of size and audience. Then, you reach out to their editor or site administrator and ask if they’d like to swap blog articles and you each take turns featuring each other’s blogs and linking back to the site. Special measures should be taken to avoid duplicate content, but this is a great way to drive new customers to your site.
Utilize your email for promoting your website can be another way to increase your website traffic. These are some steps that can be done. Not only using emails is great for social promotion, but they’re also an amazing tool for driving traffic through a newsletter. Make sure that you have a newsletter opt-in on your website. We personally use a great tool called Drip. It’s free and very easy to set up.
Automate your emails. Shockingly, marketing automation has only been adopted by 3 to 5 percent of all businesses. Yes, this number is higher if you only look at larger companies but this list is trying to help smaller companies compete with their bigger brethren. So, why aren’t you using marketing automation? It may have been that the costs were too prohibitive or that it seemed too daunting, but there’s help with that. There is new lower cost marketing automation platforms like Autopilot and Hatchbuck that are great for small businesses. But if you still have your heart set on HubSpot or a similar product, then look for a certified partner, like my firm, that can help onboard you and can even waive the kickoff fees that can cost several thousand dollars.
Now that you have your software set up, you need to ensure you have email campaigns set up for everything. There should be an automated email campaign when someone fills out a form, downloads some content or signs up for the newsletter. By staying in front of your customers through email you’ll continue to drive relevant traffic to your site.
