I love when clients tell us their goal for social marketing is to drive more traffic to their website.  After looking at their website, I tell them, “No You Don’t…Not Yet.”  After all, the goal isn’t to have people just visit your website, and if there is nothing on your website but boring text about you, they don’t need to leave a social media platform for that.  What is the goal of your website? Have you given that any thought?

Your goal should be to get people to TAKE ACTION once they are on your website—to subscribe, to download something, to request a demo, to sign up for a webinar, or receive a free consultation of sorts.  Social marketing works in tandem with your overall marketing strategy and that is to bring people in as a fan or follower and begin providing more targeted information to them based on their needs and responses to your content to eventually convert them to a customer, member or subscriber.

So before you set out to drive more traffic to your website from your social media sites, Google ad campaigns, or sign spinning, take a step back and do a little prep to ensure you are set up to convert those visitors to leads and customers.

Here are 5 steps to drive traffic to your website with social media:

1. Capture Email Addresses

   If your goal is to drive traffic to your site, you need to ask yourself, “What do I want people to do once they are there?” If you haven’t started capturing email addresses using an email marketing tool like Constant Contact, MailChimp, or a more robust system like HubSpot, this is your first step.  You know you’ve been saying it for years, “I should be building my email list” and perhaps you still have email addresses scattered in your gmail account, your outlook contacts and some still sitting in an AOL account from 1995.  Set up an email marketing tool NOW.  You need this step completed before you go on.  We’ll wait….go do it.

                                

   OKAY now, back to our list…

    

    

2. Create Value Products

   Create 5 value products that you can give away in exchange for someone’s information, such as email address, phone number, or other contact information. Keep in mind the more you request from people, the greater value your product or download better be.  Do you really need their mailing address, birthdate, and first born’s blood type?  These items you have created will be used in “Call-To-Action” statements, buttons, or posts on your site. The value products can be a great checklist of items that your potential clients need (10 Questions You Need to Ask Before________;  7 Must-Have Resources for_________),  A FREE Webinar; An eBook, A Ticket to Your Event; A Self-Assessment for Your Time Management quotient, etc.  Save these as PDFs and load them (or have your website manager load them) on your website, usually in your media library.  Commit to creating 1- 2 new value pieces every month to add to your downloads.  You can segment them into top of the sales funnel pieces and more qualified, bottom of the funnel items as you go along as well.

3. Create Landing Pages

   Create a page of content for each item (a Landing Page) that tells people what they will get when they download this content.  (We love LeadPages for making this so simple) A landing page is the first page someone will see after clicking on your call to action in your social media post, Google ad, or link in a piece of content telling people to “CLICK HERE FOR A FREE DOWNLOAD”, etc. A landing page has a very specific job; it is to gather information about your prospect. Make sure these landing pages are optimized with your key words and phrases so they can be found organically as well.  Your landing pages can be simple or more robust giving lots of information.  You can create a short and long version of your landing pages and test them for yourself to see which one converts is most effective.   If you know how to set up a landing page on your site you can do it yourself or again, have the help of your website manager.  It is not a difficult task once you have the copy written.

4. Now invite people to the landing pages

   Now you can drive more traffic to your website with social media. You can link directly to the landing page from different pages on your website, from your blog posts, from your social media posts, your newsletter, or even from an email. Create several social media posts that will take people to your landing pages and mix them into your content to keep new prospective clients coming to your site and more importantly, entering your email marketing database. With each step in your email marketing, you can ask different questions that will help you qualify your new leads and target your content to them further.  Again, social marketing can be used at each stage to attract new leads that are qualified through the use of these questions in your posts.

5. Make Your Site Interactive

   Now about that text -heavy website…Add some interactive pieces to your site such as a SlideShare presentation that ends with a call-to-action.  Put a video on your site that ends with the next action you’d like people to take.  Do you now see how social media can be used more strategically to attract people to your website?

   

Social media magnifies the messaging from your website, so make sure what it is magnifying isn’t a dead-end of brochure-like content. Let your conversations in your social communities invite people in for more of your expertise, more of your helpful resources, more of the relationship you offer.  That’s when you will see a greater conversion and return on your social marketing efforts.  Go ahead…invite those fans to your website now!