The number-one challenge currently faced by web marketers and site owners is the lack of website traffic. If your website is not getting traffic, you won’t be able to nurture potential clients and customers, letting them know what you have to offer.
While that is bad enough, it gets even worse. Without sufficient website traffic, you will not be able to test the key components of your sales and logistic processes. And if you spend your budget on a traffic campaign before testing the site, you may be in big trouble. To make sure that the site leads to high conversion rates, you have to test it before you spend big money on the site. Otherwise, you will end up looking unprofessional to your potential business affiliates and partners.
And you will also risk losing sales.
This means that you are caught in a vicious cycle. Before launching a massive marketing campaign to attract potential customers, you will definitely need to test your sales process. But without generating any online traffic, test marketing is going to be difficult if not outrightly impossible!
However, you can attract traffic to your site and also get a chance to test your marketing plans without splurging it all in one go. Let us see how you can go about killing these two birds with one stone.
Attract the Right Audience to Your Site as Fast as You Can
Normally, you will need answers to the following critically important questions:
- What precisely am I supposed to test on my site?
- How do I test my site?
There are many ways you can answer these two questions. From web design layout to content and copy, there are multiple combinations that can help improve your conversion rate. However, concentrating on the wrong elements may lead to a loss of focus. This is why you should always be aware of the right things to concentrate on when you are trying to attract traffic to your site.
The best thing you can do is to just stick to the basics. You should focus more on testing the following key elements of your web design and marketing strategy:
Sales Copy
This includes your benefits, warranties (if any) headline, and call to action (CTA).
Order Process
The process needs to be as simple as possible so that even novice online users will be able to place an order on your site.
Opt-in Offer
You will need to determine if your site is successfully capturing all of your visitors’ relevant contact information.
Website Navigation
This will help you to figure exactly how many clicks it might take before you clinch a sale. (The Ideal ratio is less than three).
Here it is important to understand that testing your new website will raise one big question: how will you be able to test the design and marketing elements of your site without traffic? After all, if it’s a brand new site, you won’t have much traffic to begin with.
The solution is quite simple really. You should consider purchasing traffic through different PPC search engines. Your average pay per click search engine is a lot like an auction. It will allow you to bid for the highest-ranking positions under the relent keywords of your choice.
For every visitor who will search for that specific keyword (s) that you have bid for and clicks his way to your site, you will pay your bidding price. Prices fluctuate a lot and will usually range from five cents on average to a few dollars per click for the more popular keywords.
There are many pay per click (PPC) search engines out there. However, the two best and most well-known ones that can help you to jump-start your campaign include the following:
Using the above PPC search engines has many advantages. You will get inexpensive and qualified traffic instantaneously. But that is only possible if you bid on the right targeted keywords. Apart from that bidding on traffic on more popular PPC search engines will also help you to target your site and get it ranked on more powerful free search engines, too!
You Should Always Know Exactly What Your Target Audience Wants
Unless you are running a popular site full of animal memes, the odds are that people will only come to your site if you have been offering them what they want. As a general rule, this would be either one of two very simple points:
- You have an insight into something that interests them
- You are answering a question that is important to them
It would be wise for you to remember that the internet is now considered a saturated market for many businesses. This is why trying to get started in such a competitive marketplace can be pretty stressful, especially for the initial few days and weeks. If you want to succeed, you should exercise your own due diligence regarding the current online business landscape. This way, you will be able to find the gaps and fill them with both valuable content and insights.
The Importance of Offering Value-Added Content
The richer and deeper the content that you offer to your audience members, the more likely they will become repeat visitors. In fact, they will keep returning to your site a lot, because it will become their trusted source of information.
Don’t simply parrot what can be found on other websites — give your visitors something unique, different, and exclusive.
Differentiation is the Key
If your website is an add-on to a core product or service — for example, it is a supporting site for a TV program — you will have to ask yourself a question, “Is my site giving my audience something different than the other product and information sites out there?”
Merely repeating stuff from other sites in an attempt to sag a few hits is not going to work at all. You will definitely need to give your target audience something unique, something different, and something exclusive.
Think along the lines of a fan page for a hit Netflix series. Your audience does not merely want a simple recap that they can get from any other site. If you are targeting avid fans, you should know that they are interested in behind-the-scenes action and documentaries that give them insight that they can’t find anywhere else. You should also try and offer them exclusive deleted scenes or even extended commentary from the cast and crew. Apart from that, you might consider adding an online portal to the site. This will gather all the fans in the same spot where they would be able to discuss their favorite lines and scenes from the show.
The more engaging the content, the more people it will attract. This will, in turn, automatically make it a more valuable prospect to the advertisers as well.
This holds particularly true for any online business that thrives on a new and wholesome look every few weeks. Shoes and other fashion-based products are a good example because they are based purely on trends alone.
Give your clients and customers a reason to stick around by offering up fresh content, not the same tired and old website content.
Don’t Rely on Cosmetic Measures
However, simply changing or swapping pictures on your page is definitely not enough. You should always assume that your customers are very smart and that they will easily see through your work. If you want your site to work and work well, you should change the whole product in its entirety. This means periodically updating your entire database of online products. Here, you will also have to change all of the data associated with the products as well. This can include words, statistics, and other marketing content that you use to sell your products.
Suppose a visitor comes to your website and sees the same items and blog posts every day. They will come to the conclusion that your content — and your products — are old and dated. They will have no reason to stick around and will look and find fresher content elsewhere. This is why you should replace your products and information related content as frequently as possible.
Consistency and Reliability are Critical Elements In the Success of a Web Marketing Plan
Getting your audience’s attention is all well and good. However, consistency is equally critical to the long term success of your site.
Suppose someone is hooked to your weekly gun blog and eagerly awaits the latest developments in this field. One fine day, you go on a vacation and leave your blog in the lurch. Remember, we live in a world where almost everything is just one click away. Do you really think the visitor will keep hanging around till you come back? Of course not. They will simply find other blogs and transfer their loyalty to someone who takes it more seriously.
In a nutshell, you have to be really consistent in your timely delivery of highly valuable and insightful content. This way, your readership will return the favor by also consistently returning to your site to consume it.
Consistency and Reliability Are Generally Rewarded With Loyalty
If you’re consistent in your delivery of valuable and insightful content, your readers will eagerly wait to consume it.
Suppose your site caters to an industry that has regular events. Let us take showbiz as an example. In this case, you will need to consistently update your content at the approximately the same time every day.
While punctuality is a good bonus, the single most sought-after factor is reliability. Suppose you have a website that caters to Game of Thrones fans. You upload high value and insightful content every Wednesday. This means that your target audience will also return on every Wednesday to read it. But if you start posting it on Friday, and sometimes on Saturday, then you will miss out on a lot. Not only will you start losing your audience but also the credibility that you had so painstakingly built up.
Make a Calendar
You should consider creating a content calendar — one that actively maps out all the topic ideas and milestones that you would ideally like to cover for at least a year. It is very important to have a strong and central storyline when planning your content calendar. This way, you will not be left scratching your head a few months down the line — especially if you run out of ideas and start uploading ad hoc content without a game plan to back it up.
If you can’t come up with relevant topics for a year or even for six months, maybe it is time to change the topic. It is always better to come up with a topic that you know a lot about and are interested in instead of uploading random topics.
Once you have actively plotted out all the major milestones and ideas, it is time to categorize the topics at hand. That is, you need to figure out how you would want to use each story in order to engage with your audience. You can use celebrity endorsements or even a live online one hour question and answer session. In fact, just about anything that will drive audience engagement higher.
However, you must never forget to ensure that the site remains relevant to its core aims and objectives. If the site is about GOT fans, putting information about Star Wars may or may not attract Star Wars Fans but you will lose your GOT audience for sure.
Conclusion
In light of the above, we can safely conclude that creating a highly successful website marketing campaign is not just adding a dash of color or making large fonts. You have to take the perspective of the audience in mind and create a site based on their wants and how you can fulfill them.
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