How to drive traffic to your website: Charcoal’s inbound marketing formula—pt. 1
To best explain what we mean by ‘fuel’ and why we believe it’s the product of inbound marketing, let's consider the idea lined up against its literal counterpart: gasoline for your vehicle. Consider having just designed your own car. It’s the product of your dreams and speaks to your taste. You weren’t afraid to invest, because it’s a statement piece that not only makes the roads accessible to you - it broadcasts your image to the drivers around you.
So here’s the obvious reality: without fuel, that car isn’t leaving your driveway. The roads are no longer accessible, your destination becomes a great deal harder to get to, and you can forget about travelling in style. Sure, you can still get to where you’re going - but why design the car, in this case?
Now change things up a bit. Your custom-designed car is actually your website. Without an inbound marketing strategy fuelling it, your website may as well be parked in the driveway. You’re rendered exposed to the same limitations outlined above, and left asking yourself the same question in conclusion.
Inbound marketing is constantly changing and that makes it difficult to understand at times. Compounded by the fact that everyone has a different take on how to get the job done means the whole premise can be utterly inaccessible. To remedy this, we’re breaking things down into an equation that’s sure to lend clarity to the situation! In our four part series, we’ll break down traffic, optimization, branding, and leads and how they ultimately come together to fuel your success. Let’s get started with traffic.
content + social media networking + advertising = traffic
Content: by now, you’re like to have read or heard that content is king. This statement may be true from an SEO perspective, but it comes with some caveats. Because the content trend has been realized and adopted, the web has been subject to an overflow of inferior ‘fluff’ designed solely to drive traffic. Your goal should be to create something valuable, that will create interest and networking opportunities in the long term. So how can you create valuable content? These are some great places to start:
Blogs
Infographics
Webinars
Free reports
Social media networking: social media works in concert with your content, and is a series of channels you should certainly use to deliver the goods to your interested followers. Build and nourish a community by feeding it content that it cares about, and show your appreciation by spending your most valuable online asset when it comes to responses and engagement: time. We use the following social channels almost everyday as a part of our inbound strategy.
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Google+
Advertising: On the same train of thought that includes leveraging content to make social media easier is advertising. You’ve already created the assets if you’re working your content online, and advertising is your next step in the best direction. Boost what you’ve published, get more eyes on what you have to say and the contact opportunities that follow, and you’ll find both your ad spend and time spent creating will get way more mileage. Analyze your advertising performance to sharpen things up as you go, and you’re a pro in no time. Social media advertising is relatively new and still unknown to many businesses. This results in great value for the advertiser, where even $50 can drive hundreds of unique and interested visitors. Get started with:
Facebook for business
Twitter ads
LinkedIn ads
Google PPC
Coming up: in Part II of the Charcoal inbound marketing formula, we’ll break down the formula further still, by focusing in on optimization opportunities, user behaviour, and why you should care, so stay tuned!