Before someone can journey through your website, we first have to get them to the starting line. In this blog post, we’ll unpack the top four strategies that I recommend for driving traffic to your website. Each of these strategies are important, and I personally don’t value one of them over the rest. In fact, I believe nearly every organization should engage all four of them to an extent. Depending on your industry, there may be some nuance as far as which of these strategies you lean most heavily on, but all four of them will help to drive traffic to your website.
These four attraction strategies are:
- Outbound Marketing
- Inbound Marketing
- Paid Ads
- Relational Marketing
Outbound Marketing
I know the term “outbound marketing” might sound intimidating or confusing if you’ve never heard it before. But the concept is quite simple. Outbound marketing is any kind of marketing effort that involves you “pushing” your brand into the marketplace. It’s cold outreach. Cold calls. Cold emails. Direct mail. This essentially implies that you and your team are actively contacting other individuals and sharing information about your brand. These “prospects” that you’re calling, emailing, or sending snail mail to wouldn’t otherwise know that you exist. They haven’t been on your website. They haven’t engaged with you on social media. They haven’t opted into an email list. This is why we call it a “cold call” or a “cold email.” They haven’t at this point been warmed up by any brand interaction and you’re making the first move.
Does outbound marketing work? Yes. But, there are certainly best practices to utilize cold outreach effectively. My aim isn’t to teach you all of the best practices involved in crafting the perfect cold email. However, as it relates to leveraging outbound marketing to attract visitors to the homepage of your website, I do have a few key tips.
Tip #1: Be personal
You’ve received cold calls and cold emails. We all have. It usually feels icky. That’s because these call centers and email marketers are targeting thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of prospects per day. They usually know almost nothing about you when they send the first email, make the first phone call, or hit send on the first LinkedIn message… and it shows. If you’re going to engage in outbound marketing efforts, try your best to be as personal as possible. In the email world, you can do so with personalized “snippets.” These snippets allow you to address your recipient by their first name, the name of the city they live in, the name of their business or organization, and more. The same can be true for direct mailers and LinkedIn messaging. No one wants to feel as though they just got the same spammy email as five thousand other people. Do whatever you can to stand out and build personalization into your cold outreach.
Tip #2: Offer Free Value
Most cold emails are trying to sell you something. And it almost never works. Every time I get an email from someone who starts off by trying to sell me a new product or service, I immediately delete or archive it. The same is true for cold calls. As soon as I answer the phone and catch a whiff of someone trying to make a sale off of me, I’m instantly uninterested. The most effective outbound strategy you could implement to drive traffic to your website doesn’t revolve around you asking for a sale. It revolves around you offering value for free. You could even start your engagement with a prospect by saying, “Hey, by the way, I’m not here to sell you something. I genuinely love linking arms with leaders in your industry and would love to give you free (no strings attached) access to a free tool I just developed.” By letting your outbound recipient know that your intentions aren’t to just make a quick buck off of them, but that you genuinely want to offer value, it immediately disarms them and changes the tone of the conversation. Lead with value. The sales conversations will come up later organically as you help more people. But the first “handshake” should always be centered around free value.
Inbound Marketing
If outbound marketing is all about pushing your brand out toward your audience, inbound marketing is all pulling your audience in toward your brand. You aren’t reaching out to prospects directly. In fact, you aren’t reaching out at all. Instead, your audience is finding you! They stumbled upon one of your blog posts. They came across the most recent episode of your podcast. They watched one of your YouTube videos. They were actively searching on Google, and your website’s SEO pointed them in your direction. Inbound marketing is a great way to grow your website audience. The key is creating compelling content that solves the problem of your audience, resulting in funneling them through the proper channels of your website, and hopefully helping them to take action in partnering with your brand.
But here’s the rub. Don’t just create content for the sake of creating content. If you simply record a podcast so that you can say that you’re the host of a podcast, you won’t attract new website visitors. If you only write blog posts because you think it’s just something you’re supposed to do, your posts won’t have an impact. If you’re aimlessly posting on social media with no plan or strategy, you’re simply wasting your time and posting in vain. Inbound marketing can be even more effective than outbound marketing, because you aren’t interrupting someone’s day by sending them a cold email. They’re actively seeking resources and finding the ones that you’ve provided. However, this will only drive traffic to your website if you have an intentional content strategy for your inbound marketing efforts.
Ideally, every blog post, social media post, or podcast episode should do one of the following things:
- Establish an initial connection between your audience and your brand
- Position yourself to be perceived as an expert in your industry
- Showcase and demonstrate the value your organization offers
- Identify how someone can take the next step with your brand
In addition, I urge you to get into the habit of adding a clear call to action in everything that you do from an inbound marketing perspective. If you’re recording a podcast episode for your non-profit, end the show by prompting your listeners to sign up for the upcoming 5k that you’re hosting by visiting the events page of your website. If you’re posting on social media on behalf of your church, include a blurb at the end of the post’s caption, prompting someone to plan their visit for Sunday morning by visiting your website. If you’re writing a LinkedIn article for your business, teaching your readers how to leverage a new project management software, be sure to include a link at the end of the article, redirecting your audience to the “book a free call” page of your website. Your inbound marketing efforts will not work if you’re simply creating content for the sake of creating content. Always link your valuable content with a clear and direct call to action.
Paid Ads
We just went over the importance of creating valuable content for your organization. But just because you hit the “publish” button on your blog post, doesn’t mean your post is going to magically get views. You may very well attract organic page views to your blog, organic downloads to your podcast, and organic followers on your social media channels. But what do you do when “organic” isn’t providing the exposure your brand needs? You visit the “exposure store.” You pay for ads.
There are several platforms to choose from when paying for ads, and even once you decide which platform (or platforms) are best for your organization, there are countless numbers of strategies and best practices to engage in. It would be worth your organization’s time to brainstorm why you’re wanting to run ads in the first place and what kind of results you’re hoping to attain by doing so. This will help you pinpoint the right platform and strategy.
For instance, our company has leveraged Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads, and more. We’ve found that “social media ads” don’t perform as well for our agency as Google Ads do. I believe it’s because when you’re running a social media ad, you’re disrupting and interrupting what someone is on social media to do in the first place. People are scrolling on Facebook to keep up with friends and family and learn what’s going on in the world. If someone is in the middle of commenting on their niece’s cute baby photos, your ad is sidetracking them. Even if you have a great offer, discount, service, or solution, engaging with a brand like yours isn’t the reason they opened the app.
However, the beauty of Google Ads is that you’re funneling marketing dollars into a tool that is actively helping people find what they’re already searching for. If you’re a plumbing company running Google Ads, your clients are already looking for a plumber in their city, and are actively scouring the first page of Google to decide who to call first. If you’re a church running Google Ads, you’re catering to the countless number of families in your city who are typing “church near me” into their search bar. If you’re a non-profit, your Google Ads help to connect you with donors, partners, applicants, or individuals who are already scouring the internet for an organization like yours. People are actively searching for brands like yours. Your Google Ad helps to position your brand as the obvious choice.
Now, depending on your industry and the particular reason for visiting the “exposure store,” there certainly can be instances when a “social media ad” makes more sense than a “search ad.” For instance, if you’re an e-commerce, product based business selling t-shirts online, you probably should be running social media ads. If you’re a church trying to advertise a particular event such as Easter Sunday or VBS, you probably should be running social media ads. If you’re a non-profit, prompting runners to register for your annual 5k race or half marathon, you probably should be running social media ads. Again, once you figure out why you’re wanting to run ads, you’ll be able to more accurately determine which platform and strategies make the most sense for your specific needs.
Relational Marketing
So far, we’ve covered mostly digital ways to drive traffic to your website. Outbound marketing, Inbound marketing, and leveraging paid ads are all great ways to get more people to land on the homepage of your website, but our list for attracting new visitors to your website would be incomplete without mentioning relational marketing. In fact, I’ve personally found that relational marketing can carry a more packed punch than any of the other three, simply because it feels natural, organic, and humanized. Relational marketing is any marketing you lean into that involves real life human contact. Shaking hands and passing out business cards at networking events. Setting up a booth at a trade show or a conference. Speaking engagements. Book signings. Ribbon cuttings. You get the idea. You’re literally brushing shoulders with other humans and having the chance to tell them about your organization.
I’ve personally had the opportunity to speak at conferences, teach workshops, and facilitate training intensives on website strategy and brand development, and I can tell you first hand that this can be an extremely effective way to generate website traffic for your organization. First, because you’re typically utilizing a “one to many” approach. Instead of spending thirty minutes on a sales call with one person, you’re facilitating a workshop with an audience of thirty qualified leads. Instead of sending an outbound email to a random list of prospects, you’re the keynote speaker at a conference, communicating to an audience of three hundred event attendees. A “one to many” approach packs a punch and is an effective way to leverage relational marketing.
Relational marketing can also include referrals and “word of mouth” marketing. While our agency does use outbound marketing, inbound marketing, and paid ads, we get lots of traffic, leads, and sales simply from “word of mouth” marketing. When someone has a poor experience with a brand, they talk. A lot. They tell their friends to stay away, to use a different service, to go to a different church, or to seek a different non-profit to partner with. But the same is true when people have a remarkable experience. People talk. A lot. Our agency has been able to help hundreds of great business leaders, church pastors, and non-profit leaders. But guess what? Great people know great people. Winners hang out with winners. And we regularly have our past customers send new customers our way. When your organization is able to help someone in a meaningful way, they’ll tell people about you. Always remember that every member of your audience is a real human who has real human connections. They have family members. Friends. Work colleagues. Classmates. And if you can leave a positive mark on someone’s life, they’ll tell everyone they know about you.
