As a B2B company, you love leads. And to get leads, you need qualified traffic to your website. Lots and lots of qualified traffic.
For one of our clients, we recently increased their organic traffic by 108% within six months. For another, we increased monthly unique traffic by 98% within a mere four months. And for yet another, the results included a 236% increase in monthly unique traffic within a year.
So, how can you drive boatloads of qualified traffic that’s truly interested in what you have to offer?
And how can you drive traffic organically, without relying on the crutch of advertising or any type of paid media, where the traffic drops immediately to zero as soon as you stop dishing out the funds (in comparison to organic traffic, which compounds over time).
Some of the answers may surprise you.
Read on for eight reliable, organic ways to drive more traffic to your B2B website.
1. Creative, Lateral Thinking
Before you begin any new campaign, you should make sure that your foundation is configured at the DNA level to generate results.
How?
Be different. Be creative. Be bold. Be decisive.
When they zig, you zag.
Applying lateral thinking and being irresistibly creative is one of the most powerful and effective strategies for improving your marketing performance and increasing site traffic and leads… without any increase in costs.
Even with optimization and testing, unless you’re being creative you run the risk of being a copycat brand that doesn’t stand out and can’t cut through all the noise. After all, when you optimize something that’s mediocre, all you wind up with is slightly-better-than-mediocre results.
So why do so many companies rush into campaigns before they’ve nailed a super compelling message? One of the great mysteries of our time… but we see it literally all the time.
And it’s not that we simply need to think laterally. We need to be highly creative. So creative, that it even might be laughable.
That’s right. Laughable. According to Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, sometimes the best business ideas are the most laughable at first glance.
Hoffman has stated, “The first truth of entrepreneurship and investing is that the very big ideas are contrarian, because the contrarian is part of the reason why a bunch of large companies and competitors haven’t already done it, why a bunch of other entrepreneurs haven’t already succeeded at it. And so that leaves space for the creation of something; and to create something big, you have to have that initial space. For example, in the early stages of Google, search was a terrible way of making money in advertising, because advertising is time-on-site. And what does search do? It shuffles you off the site as fast as you can go. That’s not a good business model.”
2. Leverage 3rd-Party Platforms
Want to drive more traffic to your website? Easy.
Once you know that you’re being creative enough with your marketing ideas, messaging and campaigns, look to strategic partnerships to efficiently get in front of new, large audiences.
For example, enter into referral partnerships for ongoing traffic and leads. By partnering with complementary companies targeting the same audience, you can refer leads to one another when the additional services would add significant value.
Beyond referral partnerships, partner with others for 10X content. Get interviewed on webinars, podcasts and in blog posts. Stratabeat partners with the web hosting company WP Engine (Disclosure: We use WP Engine for many of the websites we build. It’s no secret that we love them and think they are awesome.) As a result of the great relationship, Stratabeat has been the featured presenter on five different WP Engine webinars. Keep in mind that WP Engine has more than 80,000 customers, and so this allows us to not only shower them with new knowledge to power their websites (genuinely helping WP Engine’s customers), but also gets us in front of thousands of new audience members who may not have known about us.
3. SEO
When done right, SEO can drive 60%-80% of your website’s traffic. But there are hundreds of Google ranking factors. Where to start?
One of the secrets to accelerating your SEO results and increasing your site traffic faster is to identify where you are already generating Google page one and two results. Double down where you’re already strong, and you’ll start seeing organic search results much faster than if you were to try to start ranking in an area where you’re currently weak.
Thinking longer term, an effective way to gain rankings and drive organic traffic to your website is through SEO topic clusters. Topic clusters are hub-and-spoke configurations based on important keywords, creating an interlinking structure that clearly communicates to Google that you are an authority on the topic.
Complementary to SEO topic clusters is long-form blogging. Reverse engineer the top rankings in Google to assess what it will take to make it onto page one and to even beat them.
We cannot recommend long-form blogging enough as a key part of your SEO process. Long-form blogging, with anywhere from 2,000 words to 6,000 words per post, helps you leapfrog those that are already ranking on your target keywords. Just make sure that your long posts are absolutely filled to the brim with quality.
You want even more organic traffic through SEO? OK, go after long-tail keywords. There’s less competition for these keywords, and the traffic should be highly qualified (meaning more actual leads). Google has stated that 15% of its more than six billion daily searches are completely new to the search engine – that translates into a continual flow of new opportunities for you to secure new, additional rankings.
Another way to juice up your SEO results is to structure certain content in the form of answering questions. You’d be surprised just how much search volume there is in question format (e.g., “how to get a business loan” has 4,000 monthly Google searches in the U.S.), and so this can be an effective complement to your main SEO work.
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4. Content Atomization
Complementary to SEO, here’s another great way to drive more traffic to your website. If you’re already producing content as part of your overall marketing program, there’s an efficient onramp to scale your production and impact.
It’s called content atomization, and the idea is to take a core, base content piece, and then to translate it into many different pieces of content:
- Customize a core piece of content for different audiences, or
- Slice and dice the content into various digestible chunks that can be published in different platforms in different formats in different ways.
This is a cost-effective way to increase your content marketing ROI many times over.
5. Original Research
BuzzSumo has stated that its original research drives more traffic than anything else it publishes. And for good reason. Original research cuts through the mountains of “meh” content that we’re flooded with everyday.
You have expertise. Just use that expertise to conduct first-party research and turn it into unique content that none of your competitors have. We did this for a client in the healthcare space, and drove thousands of downloads of the report, while doubling overall organic traffic – the associated blog posts were by far the most popular compared to anything else published that year. On top of that, the effort ultimately resulted in the client’s CEO being interviewed five times on national TV that year.
If you partner with a research firm, you can gain added credibility, which should help you in capturing much more media attention, thus driving even more traffic your way.
If you’re looking for a content strategy that delivers outsized ROI, look to unique research.
6. Irresistible Headlines
According to Copyblogger, on average, only 2 out of 10 will click past a headline to read a blog post itself. So you can see how critical it is to get your headlines right. Nail your headlines, and drive more traffic to your website while also increasing engagement.
Make your headlines compelling. Make them important. Make them valuable. Solve problems. Surprise them. Or try making your headlines urgent.
Upworthy.com gets roughly 2 million to 3 million in monthly traffic through content. One of the keys to their success was their article title generation process. For every post, the editorial team writes a minimum of 25 headlines before selecting the best one.
How many title options do you write? One? Two? Maybe three at most?
Ramp up to 25, and you’ll assuredly generate more effective titles that will result in higher clickthrough rates and traffic.
7. LinkedIn Marketing
If you’re a B2B, you should be active in LinkedIn. It’s a complementary platform to drive traffic to your website, blog and other digital assets.
Video posts tend to generate 3X-5X the views and engagement of other posts, so we recommend that you include video in your LinkedIn strategy.
To gain even more reach, you should be posting in LinkedIn through your personal account (complementary to your company page). We’ve found that personal, text-based posts generate 10X-20X the views and engagement of a regular corporate post. With returns like these, you’d be crazy not to post from your personal account.
Plus, with LinkedIn, you can conduct ABM or other targeted marketing campaigns, helping you to drive precisely the right traffic to your site.
8. Evoke an Emotional Response
How to drive more traffic to your B2B website? No matter the marketing channel or tactic, one way to improve your results is to evoke an emotional response from your audience.
Emotional marketing is the accelerant to all traffic-driving marketing.
When we say that long-form blogging or content atomization or LinkedIn marketing is a great source of traffic, each one is more effective when you inject emotional marketing into it. In fact, Google and the CEB found that emotional B2B marketing is twice as effective as B2B marketing not centered on emotions.
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The post How to Drive More Traffic to Your B2B Website appeared first on Stratabeat.