It can be a common misconception for website owners that once a website is launched, your customers will follow. But actually, launching a website is only half the battle. You still need to get people onto the website. And it’s not enough to simply just launch a website and expect people to find you.
A website acts as part of the ‘Awareness’ part of a typical sales funnel. And if your audience can’t find you, then they’ll end up looking at competitors instead.
From SEO, to Google Ads, to social media. There’s a huge variety of things that you can be doing for your website to find your audience and spread your message. We’ve outlined some of the most common tactics you can consider for reaching your goals.
Google Ads
Google Ads, also sometimes known as PPC, are the ads you see when you search for something on Google. It’s a great way to begin driving immediate and relevant traffic to your website, and is very targeted – your ads are only shown for the keywords you define, and then you only pay when someone clicks it. So for example, if you sell chocolate cookies, you could choose to show your ad when someone searches ‘buy chocolate cookies’, and then you only pay if they click onto your website. Only sell cookies to people in Jersey? Then select to only show your ads to people in Jersey.
Of course, there’s a bit more to it than that, but this can be a great option if you’ve just launched a new business or website that people don’t know about yet.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and is the process of optimising your website to show on Google search results. Did you know that the website in position 1 in Google search results gets 31% of clicks? And if your website is showing on page 2 of search results, you can all but kiss goodbye to anyone finding your website, so ensuring visibility of your website is key.
There are a lot of different things you can do optimise your website to increase its position in Google, from optimising your content for specific keywords, to improving page speed and increasing the number of websites that link back to your website. But one thing to keep in mind is that this is a long term tactic – it can take a couple of months for your optimisation to really start bringing results, and should be something that is constantly worked on. So if you need immediate traffic, look to something like Google Ads until your SEO work starts to pay off.
Social Media
Everyone knows what social media is, and it’s a great tool for raising brand awareness and building loyalty with your existing customer base. It’s important to work out which social channel is right for you, so ask yourself, what channels is your audience using? If you have a young teenage audience, consider Snapchat, Instagram or TikTok. If your audience are older professionals, then maybe LinkedIn.
It’s important to post regularly and monitor! If a customer interacts with you, you need to be ready to respond, or you look inactive. You’re better off having one, really well managed channel, instead of being on every channel and not having enough time to do it well. Building up an audience takes time too, so the more channels you’re on, the more resources it will take to manage.
Don’t forget, social media doesn’t need to be done by you. There are agencies that can help build you a strategy and take over the publishing and monitoring of your accounts.
Email marketing
Email marketing is fantastic, because it’s the only channel where you’re able to communicate directly with customers who want to hear from you – because they’ve signed up to receive your communication.
Even if you’re not sure if you want to send emails to customers, it’s always worth having a newsletter capture form on your website, so you can at least start building your database. Then when you’re ready, you have a list of people who are happy to hear from you.
Email marketing allows you to speak to the customers who already know you – and are more open to seeing what you have to say. Whether that’s showing new products or asking people to attend an event, don’t underestimate the power of a quality mailing database. And if you want to really push your email strategy, consider marketing automation. This can include sending a reminder email to people who abandoned their shopping cart, or sending an email about your next event to users who attended the one last month. Previous customers shouldn’t be forgotten about, as they can really help you to reach your goals.
The list of digital marketing channels is endless, but these are some of the most common, and most effective. And, whilst you can do some things yourself, it will be quicker and more efficient to get in touch with the experts. Whether this is the agency that built your website, or a digital marketing freelancer or specialist, there’s lots of options out there that would suit your goals and get people to your website!
If you’d like to find out about how we can help you reach your business goals through digital marketing, please get in touch with us.
