Your beautiful new website is live! Maybe you replaced a site that wasn’t meeting your needs. Or perhaps you just launched a business, and this is your first website. Now you can sit back and watch your site traffic increase, right?
Not so fast.
We help clients build their dream websites all the time, and we get this question a lot:
“I love my new site, but why don’t I have more traffic than before?”
Better Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and updated content can help your site rank higher in an online search, but reaching a larger audience requires a digital marketing plan.
We’ve laid out 4 key steps in creating such a plan.
Step 1: Establish digital marketing objectives.
Review your overall business strategy and objectives:
- What is it you want to be known for?
- How are you trying to achieve that with your other marketing tactics?
Your digital marketing must support this strategy.
Step 2: Set measurable, realistic goals.
If you’ve done digital marketing in the past, base new goals on past data.
- How many people did you reach?
- How many (what percentage) turned into customers?
- How much did you pay on average to earn a sale?
- What was the average paid customer value?
If you’ve never advertised your business online, you have options. You can either
- Set goals based on previous non-digital ad costs and results, or
- Set modest goals and start measuring progress. If you’re lost, start with Google’s Benchmarking Reports, which show statistics by industry.
Figuring out how to measure your goals is an important part of this step. Tracking conversions and revenue on an e-commerce site is simple. Gathering data gets more complicated when your goal is to get someone to a storefront, make a phone call or simply learn. Even though these actions aren’t as easy to measure, it’s still possible to track and attribute value to them–it just takes a bit of creativity.
Step 3: Set a budget.
If you’ve advertised online in the past, look at past campaign results plus overall business growth to determine your new budget.
If you’re new to digital marketing, we recommend one of the following approaches to setting a budget. You could…
- Reallocate marketing dollars you used to pay for an outdated traffic source.
- Look at your goals, the cost per “interaction” (click, for example), and conversion rate.
Example:
You want 5 online sales per month. Your online conversion rate is 5% (Conversion Rate = Number of Sales / Total Visitors). The “Cost per click” in your industry is $2.50.To get 5 conversions, you need at least 100 visitors per month. They’ll cost $2.50 each, for a total of $250.00. Your cost per conversion = $50. If your average order value is $5.00, you’ll need to consider a different tactic, or lower your bid and your traffic expectation. You can also try on-site tactics to try to increase your average order value.
- Set a budget you’re comfortable investing, and consider it a test. If you don’t get the results you want, shift your budget into a different tactic or pause the campaigns.
Step 4: Choose tactics.
Your business strategy shouldn’t budge during the year. But in world of digital tactics, things change all the time.
“Don’t plan a detailed strategy that goes over 3 months,” says Jared Carrizales, founder of Heroic Search. “Broad strokes can be longer, sure, but digital strategies and media in general shift so quickly you don’t want to have to go back to the drawing board in month 5 simply because the next Snapchat was released and now you have to have a separate campaign behind it.”
Use digital marketing trends to help choose the best tactics to achieve your goals:
| Sample Goal | Tactic |
| Storefront visits and purchase; known target demographic | Facebook CPA campaign |
| Storefront visits and purchase; known target demographic | Facebook oCPM campaign |
| Awareness during online research | Google Search Ad |
| Awareness while reading related content | Google Display Network |
| Previous customer re-engagement with new location | – Facebook Boosted Post to “Fans” – Email Campaign |
Whatever your objectives, there’s a digital tactic to reach the right audience at the right time.
And, here’s a hidden Step 5 for reading this far: Don’t expect huge results overnight. Optimization takes time. With the right tactics, targeting and creative in place, you’ve built a pathway for visitors to come to your website.
