In the past two years, digital transformation has taken an accelerated ramp-up across the world. Traditional marketing such as flyers distribution and banners are slowly going irrelevant, instead it has largely gone over to the internet platform. For instance, Google Ads brought in over USD 50B revenue for Q2-2021 as compared to the same quarter a year ago which stood under USD 30B. That is an insane 69% increase year-over-year.
Digital marketing comes in many forms, and having your own website is one of them. However, there are still business owners who think that website is not something essential, some created their own website as a formality but without any marketing strategy, etc. In this era when the world is highly connected with internet, customers will go to the internet and survey on the available products out there before committing to buying something. Customers are likely to check the legitimacy of the business, look at the customer reviews and compare prices from different sources. Hence, it’s important to master the art of customer journey.
Sales Funnel
The ultimate goal of running a business is to get customers to buy your products/services, thus generating profits. Before we can even generate the profits, there are couple of stages along the journey that ideally you would like the customers to go through. The easiest way to explain the customer journey is by looking at the sales funnel model.
The sales funnel stages could differ from one business to another. Generally, we follow the top-down, 4-stages traditional model:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
Stages of sales funnel. (Image credit: Salesforce)
At the top of the funnel, the awareness stage is to reach as many target audience as possible and build up the prospect. This is also the stage which customers get to know your business and products/service, hence marketing plays a big role here. Depending on your marketing strategy, customer may or may not move to the subsequent stage of the sales funnel.
Driving traffic to your website
In order to increase your web traffic, I will break it down into two categories: strategies and your marketing channel’s algorithm.
First up, the strategies. A good strategy should follows a thorough market survey. The first step of marketing is to understand the customer needs in the marketplace. Then, perform a market analysis to find out the existing competitors that offers a similar value as what your business is going to offer. Next, you need to determine how your product, services or blog contents is going to give you an edge over your competitors. Finally, plan your marketing strategies in accordance to your target audience. Your target audience can be grouped according multiple criteria such as demographic, age, gender, geographical location etc.
Next up, the marketing channel’s algorithm. There are many channels that we can use such as social medias, search engine ads and email marketing that could ultimately leads the traffic back to your website. In order to shed a light on how powerful is the social medias today, there are more than 2 billions active users on Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok. Most of them support ads campaign. Based on the marketing strategies that you have planned, you can customize according to criteria like target audience, daily budget, template and call-to-action format.
Website links on Instagram Advertisement. (Image credit: Shopify)
If your business already have an existing subscribers base, you could also use email marketing with a link to your website. This is particular useful when your customers are already aware about your business.
Some use cases of email marketing include updating prospects about new product/services launch and new blog publication. If you are a beginner, you can opt for some marketing SaaS providers such as Salesforce and MailChimp. If you are a developer and embrace challenges, you can use Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) to perform mass email communication at a low cost.
Email sending process of Amazon SES. (Image credit: Amazon Web Services)
Last but not least, we can also implement search engine optimization (SEO) on your website to increase your ranking in the search engine. Here, you would always want your website to appear in the first page of the search engine, let’s say Google.
For website that is running on WordPress, SEO can be easily setup by integrating the relevant plugins such as Yoast SEO. It offers free plan which could satisfy basic requirement of SEO (of course you can opt for premium plugin to unleash its full potential).
For website developed with HTML, you could spend some time in adding the relevant tags to your HTML elements especially in the title and meta description.
Don’t forget to perform frequent monitoring and analysis of your web traffic. Web services such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics can be used to track and report traffic which then allows you to finetune your website and marketing strategy.
Dashboard report of Google Analytics. (Image credit: Google Marketing Platform)
Summary
Today, businesses own a website for various objectives such as product/service introduction, landing page and e-commerce shop. Having merely a website does not guarantee web traffic. There are still some works to be done in order to drive those traffic to your website.
A sales funnel consist of 4 main stages, and creating awareness is the very first step of the customer journey. For this objective, digital marketing is the answer to it. Digital marketing comes in various forms, notably social media, search engine ads and email marketing. If they are properly implemented, they could bring you a significant amount of traffic, thereby increasing the chance of converting prospect into a real customer.
While the prospect conversion still ultimately depends on how your business sparks the interest in the customers, the conversion rate will definitely increase if you are able to reach a large pool of prospective target audience. Remember, if you do it right at the first step, you would already have half of the success in the pocket.