For some small business owners and nonprofit digital marketers, the toughest stage of building a great inbound marketing strategy is the first: how can your site design ensure that not only is it effectively attracting website visitors, but that the visitors that it attracts have the potential to become customers?
Marketers often tend to look at organic site traffic as the metric which definitively shows how successful your inbound marketing efforts are, but it's important to know how to drive traffic from the specific populations that are in the market for your product or solution.
Customer attraction is largely one of the most expensive processes in the conversion process. In fact, it's estimated that for every 92 dollars that are spent attracting a new customer, it costs only 1 additional dollar to convert them. That's why it's of the utmost importance to maximize your ROI in the early stages of inbound marketing - the attract phase. Here are some proven tactics to attract website visitors and drive more qualified traffic to your site.
66% of marketers reported that SEO was their top priority in their inbound marketing strategies, and for good reason. In the attraction phase of inbound marketing, prospective customers are wide open and eager to read information about the product that they need from authoritative sources. For this reason, Gogle and the major search engines have ensured that the pages that show up in organic searches go a long way in informing their view of the buying process as a whole.
Look at factors like keyword proximity, link building and other tried-and-true SEO tactics to build your site's ability to become optimized for organic search.
It's also important to be sure to manage on-page and on-site SEO, which not only means the content, but also the infrastucture - ensuring your website is optimized for speed and security.It's likely that when prospective customers open their browsers to search for a product, service or organization that provides a personal benefit, they already have a question or key phrase in mind. Research the keywords that will direct you to the largest audiences in your market, and create content that offers support in the right place at the right time — without interrupting.
Different types of content are key for different stages of the inbound marketing process, so be sure that you have a concrete strategy for drawing in new business, rather than just guessing. 60% of marketers say that content creation is their top priority in the process of lead generation. There are a number of tools, like MOZ for SEO or Hubspot's Keyword Tool which can assist in the process, but the strategy is going to guide your approach.
While marketers often think of social media as a way to manage customers already deep in the conversion process, it can be used to attract website visitors just as well. For example, if your company is having a promotion or contest, promote your marketing on the topic to a wide audience; chances are, you'll reach a few interested strangers and turn them into customers.
Another method of using social media to attract qualified visitors is by contributing in community discussions led by authoritative leaders in your field. By attaching your voice to the discourse of other sources with larger followings than yours, you allow your brand to be more visible to prospective customers.
Your SEO, content marketing and social efforts likely won't be enough to maximize your attraction to potential buyers, so you're going to want to supplement this "earned media" with attention that you can pay for. Google PPC campaigns, Adwords and other paid marketing campaigns have an ability to elevate your attraction to the highest level possible.
With all of the obstacles involved with the process, and the comparatively low ROI associated with lead generation and the attraction stage of the inbound marketing process, it's no surprise that 65% of respondents said that generating traffic was their company's top marketing challenge.
When it comes time to attract website visitors, make sure that your site is attracting the right ones; these tips will ensure that your site has the ability to drive qualified traffic to boost your whole inbound marketing strategy.
