Six tips for driving website traffic with a limited marketing budget
Imagine this: you are a marketing coordinator, you have the responsibility of attracting consumers to your brand and you have to make your boss happy. However, when you see your funding, you are disappointed. You think to yourself, “How am I supposed to make a lot of money on a small marketing budget?”
As the founder of a digital marketing agency, I’ve discovered the misconception that you need an endless, exploding marketing budget to get anywhere online is a myth. Truth be told, if you do enough strategic planning upfront and aim for realistic, targeted results, you can succeed on a limited budget.
Digital marketing doesn’t have to be expensive.
From my point of view, digital marketing shouldn’t be expensive. You need to plan the channels and resources you will allocate to your overall marketing efforts. It doesn’t matter if it’s SEO, pay-per-click advertising or social media marketing, whatever platform you plan to tackle, you can dominate it with strategy and refinement. meticulous.
You can choose to work with an agency to help you, or you can do it yourself. Keep in mind, though, that if you’re not a marketing expert or are trying to learn the ropes early on, your budget can be eaten up quickly. Be sure to weigh all the options you have and eliminate any that could potentially eat into your marketing dollars unnecessarily.
The good news is that even a beginner can take a few simple steps to drive traffic without spending too much money. If diving into a dedicated, expert-led campaign isn’t right for you yet, this is the best place to start.
Here are some ways to start driving traffic to your website:
1. Use search engines to your advantage. You might need a bit of SEO information here to help you out, but in a nutshell, you want to get as much traffic as possible from this organic platform. This means optimizing your content and website for the keywords and phrases you know your target audience would search for. There are a few free tools available that you can quickly find online.
2. Check for broken links. You will lose leads and customers due to broken links on your website. Review your website and see if you have any URLs that need fixing. It’s a quick way to recover traffic that you would otherwise let slip away.
3. Assess who is talking about you. Has anyone written or talked about your brand without linking to your page? Consider contacting them and politely asking them to do so. This can help you get more opportunistic traffic.
4. Update your old content. It’s a big. If you’ve made efforts to blog in the past, take a look at Google Analytics and see what content is performing the best. Update these posts with new stats, facts, quotes and images that will attract new attention. Let your audience know it’s been updated as a call to action at the bottom of the article, and even with a “[UPDATED for 2020]” tag in the title.
5. Use manual awareness as a companion. I’m a big fan of going back to authentic relationships and connections to bond and build brand awareness. That means scouring the web for like-minded people in your industry who are already writing about brands, services, and products like yours. You can offer them an incentive to write about your business and turn their followers into yours. Think of it as digital public relations, otherwise known as outreach.
6. Update your ranking content. Use your choice of SEO tool to see what content ranks on page two of Google. This is the type of content you want to refresh, optimize and get to the first page. It is a low hanging fruit that will pay dividends in return.
Sometimes driving traffic to a website with a limited marketing budget is a lot to manage. There are many aspects to juggle, and you always have to make sure you stay on track with branding and style guides. But by setting honest expectations and following the steps I’ve outlined above, you’ll be well on your way to building brand awareness with limited costs.