Every business owner has found themselves thinking, “how do I drive more traffic to my store?”. Perhaps you have recently taken the time to complete your store setup, or maybe you’ve opened up and found yourself with zero sales. It’s also possible that your business has been growing over the past year but has recently hit a plateau. Another possibility is you have a highly successful business, and you’re looking to take the next step in growth.
Regardless of where you’re at, whether you’re attempting to attract your first customers or your millionth customer, driving traffic to your online store is a critical element of growing your business. For a properly optimized site, an increase in traffic means more conversions and higher profit. Below will examine five highly effective ways to drive more traffic to your online store today.
Pay Per Click Advertising
Increasing website traffic to your online shop requires first being in front of your target customers. Paid ads, either social media or search, allow you to serve the right content to the right audience at the right time to generate clickthroughs and product purchases.
If you’re considering running pay per click advertising, the below platforms offer the best return on investment.
With ever-increasing popularity, particularly among millennials, Instagram represents the best platform for businesses targeting potential customers between the ages of 15 and 35. A full 73% of Instagram’s 1 billion active users each month fall within that age group.
Instagram introduced more tools for business owners at the end of 2019 and is fast becoming the go-to platform for social media advertising. In fact, Instagram brings in amongst the highest mobile ad revenue of any digital platform, including Facebook and Google.
Even for businesses with strong influencer relationships and large numbers of followers can benefit from running paid advertising through Instagram.
Facebook has over 2.41 billion active monthly users and is the third -most visited website on the Internet behind only Google and YouTube. With a full 74% of Facebook users spending an average of 38 minutes a day using the platform, it provides an unparalleled opportunity to get your business in front of your target audience. Facebook offers a wide range of advertising tools, including industry best audience targeting that allows you to serve your ads to users based on their location, interests, or similarity to your existing customers.
Furthermore, with the introduction of dynamic ads, Facebook provided businesses with the opportunity to deliver advertisements to potential customers who have already visited your website. These ads will feature products that potential customers have already added to their cart or even just looked at. Retargeting ads provide a powerful way to reduce abandoned checkouts and drive users back to the website.
While often overlooked, Pinterest boasts one of the highest rates of influence on users when it comes to their purchasing decisions. According to its users, 93% indicate they’ve used it when researching a purchase, and 52% report they’ve purchased something through an online store after first seeing it on Pinterest. Even though Pinterest lends itself particularly well to niche groups like home décor and fashion, it’s benefits are by no means limited to businesses in those industries.
For business owners unfamiliar with Pinterest, their ads are structured in the form of promoted pins, which pushes a business’ products to the top of the results when potential customers are searching for similar items. Something Pinterest does very well, is presenting the promoted pins in such capacity that they blend in and look to be part of the standard search. This allows it to come across as more organic than targeted and puts users at ease.
Help Your Website be Discovered Through SEO
Search engine optimization, better known in the industry, as SEO means optimizing your website for a set of identified keywords to ensure your website ranks highly in the search results.
A good starting point is to determine whether your potential customers are even able to find your website. It’s essential to look at this pragmatically and search as though you’re a customer and not the business owner. Often business owners find it’s harder to find their websites than previously imagined.
While you can’t always be number one in the search results when people are searching for keywords related to your business, it’s worth striving to be on the first page. While one-third of all searchers click on the first organic result, an additional 60% won’t look past the first page. The first-page ranking is critical to ensuring sustainable traffic being driven to your website month after month.
While SEO has become a bit of a buzzword, it represents a science and is only successful with continued effort. Search engines like Google update their algorithms frequently, creating a continually changing environment and set of rules that need to be followed to ensure top ranking. If you don’t have the time and energy to put into ongoing search engine optimization, it’s best to work with an agency that can deliver better results in less time.
Use Giveaways and Contests to Boost Engagement
While SEO represents a longer-term solution for generating traffic for your website, giveaways and contests provide a short-term boost to not only website traffic but social media engagement.
Giveaways and viral contests offer an easy way to increase the amount of traffic to your website by providing low cost but desirable prizes in exchange for the engagement of both customers and potential customers alike. The concept of getting something for free provides a compelling reason for people to visit your website or engage with your social media.
Using tools like Viral Loops, or Perkzilla, businesses can easily tie contests and giveaways to the website as a whole, specific blog posts, or even custom-built landing pages. One of the most effective ways of leveraging this method of driving traffic is to use social sharing, email submission, and website visits as avenues to receive entries into the draw. It’s a good idea to use conversion methods such as coupon codes and pop-ups to encourage entrants to buy from your store while they’re there entering the contest.
Leveraging Influencers
While we’ve written extensively about the pitfalls of influencer marketing and even predicted its death in 2020, it can still be a powerful way to drive traffic to an online store when used correctly. While users are increasingly likely to trust micro-influencers, friends, and family over celebrity endorsements resulting in a smaller reach, there is still the potential to drive highly qualified traffic to your website.
When you’re identifying influencers to work with, focus on their level of engagement with their audience over the sheer number of followers that they have. Ideally, you will want to work with an influencer that regularly engages with their audience through comments and whose posts generate regular feedback from their audience. Working with micro-influencers tends to ensure proper engagement and also presents an opportunity to trade your services or products for their services. This can keep your cost down without impacting the effectiveness of the campaign.
A Nielsen study found that 92% of people value word-of-mouth recommendations over any other form of advertising when coming from a source they trust.
Content marketing
Having a blog does not make your content marketer.
It takes a plan to leverage content marketing successfully. Businesses can attract regular organic traffic to their stores through the creation of engaging, informative, and exciting content. While blogs represent the most common Avenue for content marketers, podcasts, videos, guides, and e-books are other popular pieces to connect with potential customers. Content creation is limited strictly by the imagination of the creator and different types of content lend themselves better to different industries.
Creating original content builds a business’s reputation as a leader and allows you to build a community around your brand. When forming a business content strategy, it’s important to include anything that your potential customers could find interesting or relevant. Don’t limit your created content to only your products; feel free to add any topics or resources related to your brand, the products you sell, or similar items.
A good content marketing strategy allows a business to dominate the search engine ranking position beyond just the keywords associated with the brand and products directly. When compiling your plan, it’s a good idea to leverage the Google keyword planner to find opportunities for keywords that your website can rank for in the search results that will put it in front of a broader audience.
Summing up
By taking advantage of the traffic generation methods above, your business will be able to drive more traffic to your website, and with the proper conversion rate optimization strategy, drive more sales.
