In a recent blog, we discussed how to organically grow traffic to your website. Today we’re going to delve into using the advertising capabilities of various social media platforms to get more paid traffic to your website.
While organic marketing is focused on generating traffic to your site over time, inorganic marketing, or paid marketing, uses paid methods to target, reach, engage, and convert audiences quickly.
What is Paid Marketing?
Paid marketing refers to any vehicle or channel you spend money on to catch the attention of your buyer personas. Paid marketing strategies include paid search ads, paid social media ads, sponsored posts, display ads, video ads on YouTube, Google AdWords, etc.
One of the major benefits of paid marketing is that you can micro-target your ideal audience and reach people who might never have heard of your business otherwise. Paid marketing can help you attract audiences, increase brand awareness, and convert audiences into customers on a specific campaign.
“According to The State of PPC in 2019-2020 by Hanapin Marketing, 74% of marketers consider paid traffic generation to be a huge driver for their business.”
Paid web traffic consists of visitors who land on your website after clicking on an advert. It can come from a variety of sources such as:
- Social media ads: Ads served to users on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
- Display ads: Banners, texts, images, etc. placed on third-party websites.
- Paid search: Ads that search engines like Google and Bing will show on their results pages.
The goal of paid traffic is to generate leads and transactions. A well-thought-out and executed paid traffic strategy will end up attracting visitors to your website who are more likely to make a purchase.
Benefits of Paid Digital Marketing
Digital marketing helps you reach a larger audience than you could through traditional methods, and target prospects that are likely to buy your product or service. And, it’s more cost-effective than traditional advertising and enables you to measure success on a daily basis and pivot as you see fit.
Some of the major benefits of digital marketing are:
- You can focus your efforts on only the prospects most likely to purchase your product or service. Digital marketing, on the other hand, allows you to identify and target a highly-specific audience, and send that audience personalized high-converting marketing messages.
- It’s more cost-effective than outbound marketing methods. Digital marketing lets you track campaigns on a daily basis and adjust the amount of money you’re spending on a certain channel if it isn’t demonstrating high ROI. And, with digital marketing, you have complete control over where you choose to spend your money. A digital marketing strategy allows you to swivel, safeguarding against wasting dollars on channels that don’t perform well.
- Digital marketing evens the playing field within your industry and allows you to compete with bigger brands. Digital marketing provides many chances to outrank the big players because search engines don’t care which brand is the biggest. The algorithms rank content that resonates best with the target audience.
- Digital marketing is measurable. The biggest limitation of traditional advertising is how difficult it is to measure results. With digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of pretty much any aspect of your marketing efforts.
- It’s easier to adapt and change a digital marketing strategy. Being able to easily adjust your strategy is a major benefit of digital marketing. As an example, if an online ad isn’t delivering as expected, you can quickly adjust it or pause it to yield better results.
- Digital marketing can improve your conversion rate and the quality of your leads. Being able to measure the effectiveness of each approach helps you develop better strategies. Continuously refining your methods improves your conversion rate, while investing in online marketing makes certain that everything is optimized for the highest amount of conversions. And, digital marketing provides an opportunity for you to target a specific audience that will produce high-quality leads that are more likely to become customers. Connecting your business with the most valuable leads will directly improve your conversion rate.
- You can engage audiences at every stage with digital marketing. Digital marketing channels allow you to follow the buying journey of your customers. To convert leads it’s important to understand and analyze how your customers are moving and functioning. Digital marketing allows you to track them through that process. And, if they don’t convert in the early stages, they have made a connection with your business that could impact future behavior.
Common Digital Marketing Platforms
Paid traffic is a great way to send more traffic to your website site. Some of the most common platforms to use for digital marketing, and what you can expect to achieve with them are:
- Facebook/Instagram Ads are the top option for social media managers and have the potential of giving you a good return on your investment. If you are planning on paying for traffic, you can’t skip Facebook ads and their almost 3 billion users. You have plenty of options when using Facebook ads. These include having your ads appear in newsfeeds, or even on Instagram. You can also target your ads to different demographics based on age, gender, or geographical location. While there is a lot to learn with Facebook ads, there is also a huge potential for all types of businesses.
- Google AdWords has been around for a long time and is the most popular source for paid traffic. The only major downside is that their CPC is on the high side. Google AdWords works by letting marketers choose what they think will be the keywords that customers will be using when searching for products and then bidding on these keywords. Ads get displayed as sponsored ads at the top of Google.
- LinkedIn ads are great for B2B marketing. With LinkedIn, you can target your ads to people who have shown an interest in your website and content. You can also base them on age, geographic location, and industry. What makes LinkedIn ads stand out is that they allow you to target people based on their business information.
- Twitter Ads can have significant benefits for a business because up to 94% of small business followers plan to purchase from the business. One thing to keep in mind is that the CPC on Twitter is quite high so sure that your call to action is especially strong. For small businesses, Twitter ads can offer excellent conversion rates.
How to Get Paid Traffic to Your Website That Converts
Like all marketing successful digital marketing campaigns require well-thought-out planning and flexible execution. Use the following steps and you’ll be well on your way to successfully using digital marketing to get more paid traffic to your website.
- Create a Smart Paid Traffic Strategy – The most effective campaigns are planned out in advance. This plan will help you avoid commonplace snags like little or no impressions, overspending, and a low click-through rate (CTR). Your campaign plan should be based on KPIs, thorough audience research, a clear marketing message, and a list of eligible channels to disseminate it.
- Plan Your Budget Wisely – One of the biggest mistakes in launching a digital marketing campaign is failing to conduct proper research in preparation. Depending on the industry, the Cost per Click (CPC) can vary significantly. For example, in electronics, a click can cost an average of just $0.74, which is almost nothing compared to the insurance industry, where the average price is $14.50. It’s important to know more than just how much you’re going to spend on a campaign. To bring high-quality leads to your website you also need to plan what you are going to spend your budget on and what you want in return.
- Create Winning Ad Copy – Your audience won’t forgive you if they feel misled after clicking on an ad. It’s imperative that your ads make a fair promise and deliver on it, which makes your prospects more likely to take the actions you hope for. Compelling ad copy is made up of a targeted headline and a triggering description. The first tells your prospects what is in it for them, and the second explains how they can get it there and then. Here are a few tips on how to create targeted ad copy to attract relevant traffic:
- Start with your target audience in mind. Think about what they need and how your solution can help.
- Look at your competitors and try to understand their targeting and how to outperform them.
- Generate enough material for A/B testing: Write at least 3 unique headlines and 2 descriptions to develop an understanding of user preferences.
- Launch an Effective Landing Page – Don’t waste your precious paid clicks. To know how appealing your landing page is to visitors check your landing page bounce rate, time on page, and form abandonment rate. If they leave immediately after landing, the page probably doesn’t align with the keywords it’s displayed for, and you’re talking to the wrong people. If they stay for a while but never click the call-to-action (CTA), your offer doesn’t excite them.
- When building your campaign landing page use these three principles and you’ll have an effective landing page: relevance, attractiveness, and drive. This means that it is relevant to the user query, the content and visuals are created with your buyer persona in mind, and the title and the CTA emotionally resonate with your audience.
- Utilize Multiple Platforms – According to a Smart Insights study, Google controls 67.78% of the search engine market, which makes Google Ads highly competitive. This means that the CPC there can be so high that your return on investment (ROI) will be minimized. Consequently, Google is probably not the only place your target audience visits.
- For example, the professional-focused platform LinkedIn might be one of the best places for business-related ads if you are a B2B company. Facebook has close to 3 billion users and is still the best place to reach consumers. There’s also Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, and more. Reaching out to people across all the platforms they use, not just Google and Facebook, is a great way to make the most of your ads by placing them in front of potential customers more frequently.
A Final Word
As you can see, a paid traffic strategy can be effective if you are concerned with not simply increasing the number of visits to your site, but attracting the kinds of visitors who are interested in buying your products and services. Following the steps we outlined above – develop a strategy, plan your budget, create winning ad copy, launch an effective landing page, and leverage multiple platforms – you will stand a better chance of converting this traffic into leads and sales.
Obsessed With Success is a full-service digital marketing agency that specializes in helping small and medium-sized businesses. To learn more about paid digital marketing, schedule a free one-on-one consult and we’ll be happy to take a look at what you’re doing and offer some thoughts on how you can reach your prospects better.
