“How do I get more people visiting my website?”
It’s a question we get often from business leaders. Since many of the solutions require planning and consistent effort, we wanted to address this in our end-of-year article. As with anything in life, real results require exploring your goal and clearly defining it, dedication, investment, and strategic planning.
Here are the Lillian James Creative team’s thoughts on how to achieve your goal of more traffic in 2022 (in three easy steps).
Step #1: Ask yourself “who are we?”
Do you know who you are? No, really. Have you mapped out who your ideal clients are, what they care about, what their needs and desires are, and what information they want or need from a company they engage with? In order to fulfill your destiny of becoming the best company ever in the eyes of your clients, everyone in your company has to understand who exactly those customers are and what drives their behavior.
Once you understand what drives your customer’s behavior, you can then ask the question: “Who are we, and are we a company that they will be drawn to? Do we solve our customer’s needs in a way that makes us indispensable?”
The best way to begin to address indispensability is to start by thinking about what you are really good at? What is your superpower?
- Are you the best at customer service
- Do you care more about them
- Is your work higher quality than what they can get anywhere else
- Do you have more experience
- Do you have better relationships that can be a competitive advantage
- Are you the only one offering the service in the area
- Are you more familiar with a niche they might need than anyone else
- Is your team more creative
- Is your approach novel…
Hopefully, you see where we are going with this. You can’t expect your clients to feel like you’re special if you can’t communicate why you’re special. You can’t communicate why you’re special if you haven’t spent the time thinking through why you’re special and what makes you unique.
Then, once you’ve illuminated your superpower, you have to create an internal marketing campaign around that. Every single person on the payroll has to buy in and believe that you all are on a quest to be (or continue being) the best at ____. Once enough people believe and there is an internal infrastructure to match, it becomes the culture.
The identity.
You might be surprised to find that as marketers, this step is where we spend a significant amount of our time thinking through. Then it’s on to step #2.
Step #2: Test everything
An important part of outreach is understanding what those in your target demographic care about. How do you do that?
Easy, you ask them.
Okay, so the word “easy” probably should not be there. After all, people hate taking surveys.
This is, in fact, one of the least obvious but most impactful aspects of a marketer’s job: Designing ways to get in front of a company’s target audience and understand what best resonates with them in a way that is at the same time adding to their view of the brand. While this can be a tedious step for a marketing team, it often has the potential to make outreach significantly more meaningful and impactful.
While you may know your customer, the words you use to communicate with them can have outsized importance. There is a business saying that “when we assume anything about our customer, the only thing it does is make an a – – out of u & me”
Step #3: Communicate your “who, what, how & why”
The reason this step is last instead of first is that it does us no good to communicate who we are if a) WE don’t fully understand who we are in the eyes of the customer, and b) we don’t embody that in everything potential decision-makers see.
That’s why the best marketers start with a million questions. The process of walking through those answers is often just as important as everything that comes after.
For 2022 we believe that companies will be defined by their digital presence.
With the COVID-19 pandemic making it a business and personal necessity to have a digital presence, the likelihood of a decision-maker being online is significantly higher than before. This means that companies’ digital footprint will be as important as ever.
Are you using your digital presence to establish who you are, what your superpower is, how that superpower will make a difference in your decision maker’s life, and why they should trust you?
This is the space that marketers like us at Lillian James Creative live in, and what we obsess over. The tools we use to accomplish this might change…blogs, search engine optimization, podcasts, website design, social media content, videos…but the thought process will be the same. In 2022 the key to getting more traffic is truly understanding who you are, discovering everything possible about the role you have the potential to play in your decision maker’s life, and creating content that makes each person on the other side of the screen feel an emotional connection to what you stand for.
Tadaa.