Your brand’s got great content on your website that’s sure to appeal to your target audience, but is it getting the attention it deserves? “Build it and they will come” only works in Kevin Costner movies and W.P. Kinsella novels.
Here’s a list of a few key tactics you can employ to drive quality traffic to your top content to help move the needle for your brand:
• Low Hanging Fruit: Your Brand’s Social Media Accounts: You’ve got to start somewhere, and what better place than with those people who already like your company? Start driving traffic fast by posting links to your content on your brand’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and other social media accounts.
• More Low-Hanging Fruit – Retargeting: Turn previous window-shoppers into customers and previous buyers into repeat ones by using some simple cookies and web ads to track people who’ve visited your site and serve ads to them wherever they roam online. Known as retargeting, this advertising tactic places a token or tag known as a “cookie” into the browser software of people who visit certain pages on your website (or your entire site), allowing you to track these visitors and serve them retargeting ads as they visit other sites containing web ads from a third-party vendor such as AdRoll or Google Ads Remarketing. If a user visited your website and perused content for one of your products and you later post content for a related product, you can then target that person with an ad to return to your website to check out your new information or your new product.
• Search Engine Marketing / Paid Search Ads: You can drive traffic to your great content by purchasing ads on search engines like Google and Bing (which also serves ads on Yahoo!) that are tied to search terms and keywords. You take the most important words and phrases that are central to your content and purchase ads on search engines, that are served to users when they search on your specified keywords. Here’s some information on how to get your ads on Google, and how to do likewise on Bing’s network.
• Post to Online Social Communities: Go where your target audience is by becoming an active participant in online communities where your customers hang out… and then post links to your content after you have become a valued member of these communities. Whether it’s a third-party association or influencer Facebook page or a LinkedIn Group, or someplace else in the vast world of social media, your customers are convening someplace — usually in many places. Go forth and find them, monitor social conversations, join in, provide value and then start judiciously linking to your content (only where and when it makes sense in the course of normal conversations). The beauty of this is that it costs nothing, but the downside is it can be time consuming and cost you money in people hours.
• Tap the Power of Influencer Marketing: Get people with significant followings on their blogs and social media accounts to promote your brand to their followers and to link to your website’s key content. Known as Influencer Marketing, this form of promotion follows a paid media model where you must compensate influencers. The value here is that influencers use the power of their voices to carry your water and you benefit from their pre-established credibility with their followers, to garner traffic and social media engagements (clicks, likes, shares and comments) around your brand’s content. Of course, getting bloggers with sizable followings to write blog posts can be costly and time consuming, so many marketers are turning to straight social media influencer marketing for faster results — whereby influencers post about your content solely on their social media accounts (e.g. Facebook and Twitter). Then, in order for their followers to learn more, they must click to your content residing on your website.
You can leap in and attempt to do this yourself (in fact, here’s a handy guide to getting started doing your own influencer marketing) or you can tap the power of a turn-key service, such as StatePoint Media’s Social Amplification service to do the heavy lifting for you. Our service combines the viral nature of word-of-mouth marketing with the measurability of online advertising, and delivers guaranteed clicks and other social engagements to your brand’s content on your website. We can cost effectively promote your content to our network of 500+ online influencers to drive quality online traffic and engagements targeting your key demographic.
So, when it comes to online content: Build it, promote it wisely and then they will come…
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