Driving website traffic is a major obstacle for many businesses, mainly because of how many steps that are required for a successful strategy.
What’s important is:
- Understanding who your audience is as well as how they can use your product or service
- Knowing where your audience spends most of their time online
- Reaching your audience and communicating your message quickly
There are many ways to go about driving quality inbound traffic, but not all are created equal. In fact, some hugely successful strategies that have dominated in the past, are becoming less and less reliable. This is due to evolving technologies and their overall impact on consumers because the fact is people will conform to the technology that they use.
Here are some great inbound marketing methods that you can use and succeed within 2018!
Facebook Advertising
There has been a lot of buzz going on about Facebook and whether or not it is losing its value as the world’s most dominant social advertising platform. While some users have moved to other, more niche platforms, Facebook continues to have more active users than any other social network and an advertising platform with more useful data than any other.
How advanced is Facebook’s targeting? Advertisers can target users based on simple demographics such as age, gender, and location to much more specific parameters. How specific does it get? Users can be found based on their interests (which pages they like), user behavior (which pages they’re more likely to follow or engage with), purchasing patterns (people who have been comparing prices, such as a new house, to life events (people who just got married, had kids, or relocated), and even affinity audiences, which are personas Facebook constructs, based on lifestyle choices and purchases.
To be put things into perspective, marketers can target adults of a particular age, and location, who are looking to purchase a home. That’s powerful stuff.
Facebook’s audience also isn’t exclusive to Facebook’s platform. It also extends to Instagram and Facebook’s Audience Network, which is composed of partnering websites and apps.
Instagram Marketing
Better designed for long-term strategies, Instagram Marketing offers an improved way to showcase your brand to the right audience. While other social networks rely almost exclusively on advertising, Instagram offers serious exposure potential by allowing as many as 30 hashtags per post. Like in all cases, content is king (so the best content will always win), so look for brands to get more creative with their Instagram campaigns in an effort to drive traffic to their profile pages. From there, companies optimize their pages to maximize click-throughs to their desired landing page. This works for brands because, while they receive fewer clicks than other channels, the inbound traffic they do generate tends to be of a higher quality because those viewers are already more exposed to the brand through their Instagram page.
Video Marketing
Video content has changed the way people are engaging with brands online forever. Look for new video campaigns to dominate campaigns for nurturing leads and encouraging further brand consideration in an effort for engagement to take flight.
Bottom line, quality content has never been in higher demand, and video is the best form of content for fast consumption, especially from an entertainment perspective. Through entertainment, brands will look to foster stronger relationships with their customers, which they will look to achieve through the use of live videos, such as platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. These campaigns are perfect for local attractions! How will this resonate with people? They will convey the idea of inclusion and help them feel that they are in the moment with the brand. Getting to experience a brand is far more favorable to seeing or reading about one, and this is what will help brands to stand out and drive large amounts of inbound traffic.
Email Marketing
Email offers the most cost-effective method for nurturing leads and increasing revenue. Despite common misconceptions that email is slowing down as a result of social networks and chatbots, evidence has only pointed at email growing. Why is this? Because people still rely on email as the dominant method of communication for work. While instant messaging platforms such as Slack might be gaining traction, they don’t provide the same organizational and integration perks, so they will likely still be used as an assistant to email.
Offering exclusive offers, mixed in with valuable content is becoming more prevalent as brands are looking to email as an unexpected method for promoting brand values and fostering better relationships with customers.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engines will always be vital for inbound traffic, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t add it! Google is expected to roll out a new algorithm update to further emphasize the importance of mobile and penalize fake news sites, so some content strategies might have to make some changes.
With the right keyword research and optimization strategies, Content Marketing and Link Building tactics have become quite the one-two punch for successful search engine optimization strategies.
Search Engine Marketing
Google AdWords and Bing Ads
Being able to target users by interests, demographics, behavior patterns and (of course) keywords searches, advertisers are offered a multitude of opportunities to reach their audience. With more data resources than ever, brands are finding new creative ways to spread their messages in a cost-effective fashion.
Remarketing has become the go-to advertising strategy for brands at the end of their campaigns. To combat shopping cart abandonment or simple consideration, brands are looking to retargeting for low-risk campaigns aimed at people who have visited their website.
Conclusion
So what are the big new trends for inbound marketing in 2018? They all lead to great content with preferable strategies that lead to maximized quality exposure. Just be sure to match your platforms and amplification processes with your audience and their ideal online customer journey. In other words, how do people find your business, what process do they use, and how can you grab their attention to drive the most quality website traffic? One of these steps is sure to get you on track!
