If it was easy then everyone would be doing it is a common mantra that people like to trot out as they slog the hard yard of building a business, brand or audience. It isn’t easy and it requires plenty of dedication and focuses to get it over the line. But it can be done. For every failed business there is one that is a success – or maybe not quite but there is still a reason to be hopeful. What it requires though is focus and strategy. It is much better to work smart than to work hard or, put another way, to be foolishly busy rather than to be a busy fool. When it comes to building an audience for your website this mantra is very true. Here are a few key elements that you will need to factor in as you build your traffic strategy.
Work with experts
If you are not an expert in audience development, then don’t pretend to be. Rather acknowledge this from the outset and a suitable Melbourne SEO agency to partner with you who can help to deliver on your goals and objectives. Doing this is not an admission of failure or incompetence, rather it is one of the smartest decisions that you can make.
Be aware of the elements
For your strategy to work you need to be aware of all the elements that are involved, and you need to ensure that they all work together in tandem. For instance, you will want to ensure that your eCommerce SEO work is aligned with your social media messaging or with the specials you are punting through your newsletter. These are all important elements of the traffic driving campaign but get them all aligned, and the results will be much better.
Make one person responsible
As much as there are many elements involved in growing the audience of your platform there needs to be one person responsible. If there are too many people who are measured on the success of the project then when it doesn’t work like you want it to, it becomes too easy for them to point fingers at each other. Ultimately one person needs to be in a position to be held accountable for the project. They will drive the process, handle the stakeholder discussions and do the management reports.
Measure, measure, measure
The best thing about digital is how easy it is to measure everything. Analytics and data are everywhere which means it is possible to track things like growth and return of investment very easily. These are key metrics when drafting KPIs and deciding what will be considered a success and what will be deemed a failure. Don’t be a slave to big numbers though – think through the numbers carefully. Having a big number of unique users is not particularly useful if your bounce rates are high and if those users are not spending or interacting with the platform once they are there. These are all important things to look at along with things like ARPU (average revenue per user), acquisition costs and dwell times.
