Sounds so intimidating, doesn’t it? Let’s break it down into easy to swallow steps so that you can plan how to apply it to your blog or business.
What is Paid Traffic?
Paid traffic is when you pay to get visitors to your website, your landing page or any other place you want to direct visitors. The customers are your traffic and you are paying (usually a social media channel, Google or Bing) to get them there. Ultimately you want to buy traffic to acquire leads and make sales.
What You Need
Just like everything you will need to start this process with clear goals:1. Set Up a Facebook Pixel on your website.2. Know your audience and where they hang out online.We start by thinking about how we can move our customers through a funnel, sometimes called a sales funnel or a marketing funnel. The concept is simple and you’ve probably been through thousands of funnels yourself when in the market to buy (or not in the market but were persuaded buy an influential ad).
In order for this all to work, we need to know who our customer is and where they hang out online. If you don’t market your offer using the most applicable traffic source, your offer is likely going to fail and we don’t want that. Do the research up front and really aim at that target with your best shot. This meeting can occur through various types of content such as a social media update, a blog post (YEAH), podcasts, videos, research, or case studies.
Cold as Ice
Customers who have never heard of you are considered cold traffic. These are the people you want to make aware of your business. Think about this like meeting someone for the first time. You don’t want to just walk up to them and offer them what you have. First you need to make your customer aware of the business and start to learn more about your business – think of this as virtual relationship building.
There are many ways to introduce yourself to cold traffic. You can do this in a blog post (Hi! Nice to meet you) and include a call to action in your blog post. You can post valuable content on your social media platforms or where you know your audience is hanging out.
Facebook can 9 times out of 10 become a big help to you here, but do your research to be sure that your audiences uses Facebook. If they do, here are some quick tips.
This is where the Facebook pixel (that you already installed, right?) comes in and can help you! The pixel will start to create an audience in Facebook for you by tracking who visits and where visitors went while surfing around on your website. As an added bonus, if your offerings can be segmented into categories, such as one service for content and one service for social media management or people interested in candles or people interested in rugs. Based on where they went on your site, you can segment them into 1. Customers interested in content or 2. Customers interested in social media management. This will allow you to make a more applicable offer to them based on what they showed interest in- cool huh?
Give It Away Now
OK. Now that your audience has been introduced to your brand, how can you make them interested or as I like to put it, make them want to stay awhile? …By creating something they will want and giving it to them for FREE, of course!Well, kind of – it’s more like an exchange. You create this they-can’t-live-without offer (aka a lead magnet or opt-in), which could be a simple step by step PDF they download, a helpful checklist or a quiz they HAVE to know the answers to now. Take your time with this and really create a compelling offer. Once you’ve moved your customers from cold to warm in the funnel, you’ve likely got their email now. Congratulations, that is a great accomplishment and hopefully one of your goals.
This is Not Your Mamma’s AD
Think back to the days of newspaper advertising when you placed an ad in print in the local newspaper – omg I cannot change it now. Luckily it’s not like that now! But you should put a lot of time into creating the ad as if the moment you pushed publish you were stuck with it. In reality now… if the ad isn’t working you can stop it anytime. You can test one ad over another; for example use the same copy but change the image-if one performs better then the other, you can ditch the loser. You can literally measure the ROI in days-whereas when you put your ad in the newspaper, could you ever really measure that?
Thankfully, now we have more advanced technology to help us get in front of our customers – especially if we’ve done our homework.
Now, let’s get that offer in front of them using paid traffic!
Shop With the Big Guys
But where do you go to get the best bang for your buck? This is where knowing where your people hang out comes in very helpful. Here is a quick snapshot of different channels you can buy traffic from and the types of people you will likely find there.
You will want to look into each channel that is applicable to you and understand their advertising terms and conditions. Now we have this group of fish swimming around in the warm pond that is your funnel. Warm leads are really anyone who is aware of you-they could have come to you through joining your email list or they could be people who follow you on your social channels. Either way – they know you and they are likely evaluating what you’re offering at this stage or maybe they’ve bought a low ticket item from you at this point. BUT, they haven’t bought your goal offering yet. Take this opportunity to educate them further by offering more information via email and sharing with them why they should buy from YOU! And now that you are more acquainted, you can offer up what you’ve got.Don’t stop here, continue to nurture this relationship and keep putting your brand and it’s offers in front of them and make sure you stay on top of their mind.
Michelle
Michelle is the founder of Social Sense, LLC, a content marketing and social media management service that focuses on supporting small businesses. You can read more about Social Sense at www.socialsense.net. Michelle holds certifications in Digital Marketing, Content Marketing, and Paid Traffic.
When she’s not indulging in the latest marketing trends, she enjoys baking, home decorating, chocolate, strong coffee and reading motivational books. She lives in New England with her husband and 2 boys (under 4).
