Digital Marketing Strategies: What is the difference between Paid Vs Free Traffic?

Before we get onto what is Paid traffic and free traffic, we need to understand the word traffic in the digital world and how it is important for a website. Digital traffic can be defined as the number of users visiting as well as taking an action like purchasing, saving or subscribing on the website. It can be said the every digital marketing strategy is aimed at getting traffic to the website. 

Free Traffic:

Free traffic or commonly known as organic traffic is the mostly generated through the website content itself, your social media and SEO. In order for your website to generate a good level of organic traffic or free traffic, the content needs to be top quality, original and fresh! This helps in gaining visibility through SEO and good placing in the search results which helps in redirecting the traffic towards your website. For social media to generate free traffic for the website, you need to have good networking and an understanding of your target audience.

Paid Traffic:

Paid traffic is when the advertiser i.e. you pay the publisher for the traffic they redirect to your website. The most popular method to gain paid traffic is the Pay Per Click method. This includes banner ads like we see on Facebook, twitter and other social websites or blogs. Another method for obtaining paid traffic is with keyword bidding (Google Adwords and Microsoft Bing Ads) for better search engine results.

Pros and Cons for Paid Traffic and Free Traffic:

Although paid traffic is the fastest route to generate website traffic and is successful in reaching a wide number of users, it is not a medium that generates customer loyalty. This is the reason it is often known as rented traffic as it does not ensure a repeat view from the user, whereas on the other hand, Free traffic has more branding and brand image associated with it since it involves high research and quality content curation relevant to the user. It requires a great deal of time and energy and an expert strategy to achieve.

It may appear that free traffic is the best option to choose since it is free and generated through content purely but it is also important to note that free traffic does not necessarily ensure conversion into sales. With paid traffic the results are quicker and the leads generated are useful, given that the strategy is on point.

Hence, we can conclude that both Free Traffic and Paid Traffic have their pros and cons, they hold a very different set of approach and it all depends on your set of requirements, which traffic to choose.

5 Ways content marketing helps your business.

In this digital age, content marketing has become an integral part of any digital marketing strategy and with huge competition in the market, all businesses are in the race of grabbing the customers attention. In order to get ahead, business owners and marketers need to get crafty with their marketing strategies in order to get noticed by their target audience. Content marketing is one of those creative marketing strategies. Content marketing is when small businesses communicate with their target audience by providing information instead of a sales pitch. This content needs to be relevant and enticing to the customer.

Content marketing proves crucial for small businesses in the following ways:

1. Builds brand awareness 

Regular and authentic content builds create a name and brand for small business. The content increases and improves visibility of the business by updating fresh content regularly. This helps the customer in remembering your brand and doing business with you when their need arises the next time. 

2. Convinces and encourages the customer to take action

Just like any sales, the customers may need added encouragement to make a purchase or take any other action such as subscribe or register. This task can be very creatively handled with correct content marketing as it can encourage the customer to take an action by slyly convincing them.  

3. Creates your identity as an expert in the industry

When your content is correct and is updated frequently, the customers often start looking up to your website for information with a certain trust and considering your brand or website an expert in the matter.

4. Keeps the website fresh and updated

With regularly updated content, the website remains fresh and can become more and more visible in search results. A stale and less frequently updated website tends to attract less customers or browsers the next time. This hampers the reach of the website. 

5. Helps build a community 

Regular viewers, subscribers and bloggers come together as a community and exchange ideas and information through the blog/website. This also brings new people to the website. Covering new and unique topics relevant to the events also brings in more viewers and helps create shareable content which can help increase the visibility on social platforms.content marketing helps your business.

In this digital age, content marketing has become an integral part of any digital marketing strategy and with huge competition in the market, all businesses are in the race of grabbing the customers attention. In order to get ahead, business owners and marketers need to get crafty with their marketing strategies in order to get noticed by their target audience. Content marketing is one of those creative marketing strategies. Content marketing is when small businesses communicate with their target audience by providing information instead of a sales pitch. This content needs to be relevant and enticing to the customer.

Content marketing proves crucial for small businesses in the following ways:

1. Builds brand awareness

Regular and authentic content builds create a name and brand for small business. The content increases and improves visibility of the business by updating fresh content regularly. This helps the customer in remembering your brand and doing business with you when their need arises the next time. 

2. Convinces and encourages the customer to take action

Just like any sales, the customers may need added encouragement to make a purchase or take any other action such as subscribe or register. This task can be very creatively handled with correct content marketing as it can encourage the customer to take an action by slyly convincing them. 

3. Creates your identity as an expert in the industry

When your content is correct and is updated frequently, the customers often start looking up to your website for information with a certain trust and considering your brand or website an expert in the matter.

4. Keeps the website fresh and updated

With regularly updated content, the website remains fresh and can become more and more visible in search results. A stale and less frequently updated website tends to attract less customers or browsers the next time. This hampers the reach of the website. 

5. Helps build a community 

Regular viewers, subscribers and bloggers come together as a community and exchange ideas and information through the blog/website. This also brings new people to the website. Covering new and unique topics relevant to the events also brings in more viewers and helps create shareable content which can help increase the visibility on social platforms.

5 Digital marketing aspects to grow your business

Every digital marketing is strategist keeping in mind the business’s needs and goals. Since every business has their own USP, they need to have their own digital marketing strategy that works best for their brand image and their product. Earlier when sellers were the trendsetters, it didn’t matter much what the customer feedback was, but today due to such huge advancements in technology, it is the customer calling the shots, making it very important to know the customer’s feedback and quantify their digital activities. This resulted in tools that help marketers to devise and observe the digital marketing activities and their effects. Some of these tools are:

1. Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay per click, commonly referred as PPC, requires the users to click on links in order to generate revenue whereas for retail stores, the aim is to lead the customer to their shopping page and get direct sales. Hence, PPC requires careful and skillful planning and strategizing in order to obtain maximum results. 

2. Social Media optimization (SMO)

Social media has brought and new wave of digital marketing platforms for all business small or big. With social media names such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest,Instagram and now Snapchat provide easy and free digital marketing platform to business owners even with no or minimal marketing experience. This has resulted in small business owners coming online and promoting their product while interacting with their customer at the same time. 

3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is vital in generating organic leads to the website. SEO works by identifying and analyzing the keywords searched by the relevant or target audience to increase the visibility of the website in search engine results. These keywords help create a trail of breadcrumbs for the user to follow and reach the website and also provides an insight to the business owner as to what the audience is looking for online.

4. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion rate optimization is a system to convert the website visitor into a customer. Three tools that help us in CRO are:

1) Google analytics provides a set of credible keywords that are favoured by the users and have a high probability of converting the browsers into customers.

2) Scroll map and hit map tells us what the user was looking for in the website and how far did they browse within the website.

3) A/B test and Multivariate test helps recognize the progressions, big or small, to a website that encourages a better reaction from the targeted audience or users.

5. Online Reputation Management (ORM)

ORM is vital to create and maintain a brand image of the business online, hence it refers op the core of digital marketing. In order to manage the reputation of the product or business in the digital world, feedback provided by the customers plays an important role. As digitally it is easier for the business owners and customers to interact globally in real time, ORM is the major element to achieve success in creating and sustaining a brand image.The major role of ORM includes:

1) Prompt response on queries

2) Using feedbacks efficiently and

3) Carefully handling adverse feedbacks.

Why does your business need SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Today, SEO has become an integral part of any digital marketing strategy for every industry and product. SEO determines the visibility of a website in the search results by any search engine. SEO analyses how search engines work, what people are searching for, the keywords in these searches and who are the target audience for which searches. With this analysis, the ranking and visibility of a website is determined amongst the relevant search results. 

Let’s go over the reasons that make SEO imperative for any internet marketing strategy: 

1. Increased Visibility  

Just creating a website is not sufficient today. The consumer must also be able to find your website easily. Good visibility on the search results help direct the customers to your website easily. This is done by using keywords relevant to your target audience, through which the website is optimized by the search engine and can be viewed in the top search results. 

2. Promotes Traffic   

Once the website become visible in the top search results, the traffic is directed to the website as more and more people from the target audience click on it. This is done with the help of keywords relevant to the focus audience and their search patterns.

3. Analytics   

With SEO the results can be tracked and quantified which helps in providing the insight for return on investment (ROI) for any and every kind of website, whether ecommerce or non-ecommerce. It also provides an in depth analysis of the performance of your digital marketing strategies and how the website’s visibility can be improved. 

4. Organic Traffic 

 While the Ad’s are a paid feature, the website’s ranking in the search result depends upon the keywords in its content. This results in relevant and genuine visitors on the website. The correct mix of both the strategies can help a business get more out its digital marketing strategies. 

5. Brand Awareness   

When the website is viewed in the top results, it is viewed as a trusted source by the audience, since companies on the first page are generally perceived to be more trustworthy. As  more of your web pages rank in higher positions in the search engines, there is more chances for the users to see your content and associate it with your brand.  

Someone truly said that “The best place to hide something is page two of Google search results, as nobody checks it”. This is because people seldom move to pages 2nd and more as the results on the first page are considered by the audience and the traffic gets redirected to these pages.