All of your marketing efforts, whether email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, whatever, should ultimately be to drive users back to your website.
Content is the number one driver of traffic to your website. Driving traffic to your website is like pouring opportunities into the top of a funnel. Content can be blog posts, on-page content on your websites and landing pages, white papers, videos, infographics, case studies is the number one driver of organic traffic.
The best practice here is to use these methods to distribute your content:
- Tease your content on social media platforms
- Use paid social ads to promote content
- Get bloggers and social media influencers to mention and link to your content
- Seek out guest blogging opportunities
Having enough valuable, authentic, and engaging content will help you expand your reach and drive more organic traffic to your site. The more people consume and engage with your content, the more you will establish domain authority, which helps you rank higher for your keywords.
All of that drives the user back to your site, where you have control over the experience. You should have content on your site that speaks to the needs of a prospect no matter what stage of the sales cycle they are in, starting with top-of-funnel awareness type content and moving them through the consideration and evaluation stages and ultimately the decision to convert. The definition of a conversion is relative to your goals, but for most scenarios it is getting a prospect to give you their information so your sales team can take over.
The biggest mistake I see relative to this subject is in social media. I see a lot of time, effort and budget wasted on social media marketing where the social posts are only serving to promote links to other websites and other peoples content, or it’s just some random statement (usually a pitch) with no link or call to action. Social media is a tactic in your content marketing, not a marketing strategy itself. It’s a distribution platform.
Now, not every post can be a link back to one of your blog articles. You do need to build an audience and engage with that audience by curating content as well, but if you’re not using that platform to then drive users back to your website, you’re wasting your time.
Nearly 60% of the sales process is happening online right now. Buyers are online researching solutions and services that you can provide. In order to convince them to engage with you, you need to have the opportunity to make your pitch. The best place for that is on your website, where your content and user journey will help them understand what you bring to the table. You can’t do the convincing in an email or on a LinkedIn post, it’s the wrong format. So make sure your marketing is set up with your website as the hub.
Hey… I bet at least one of your friends will like this post, so, maybe go ahead and give it a share?
