8 Key Marketing Channels to Grow Website Traffic and Increase Leads

To grow the volume of your website’s inbound lead generation, at some point you will need to grow the volume of website visitors. In this article, I will cover several online marketing methods that can keep the top of the marketing funnel flowing. Following are some marketing channels to grow website traffic and increase leads that would matter most for me as a service-based small business, along with my assessment of the overall importance of each.

Marketing channels to grow your website traffic and increase leads

1. Referrals

Referral marketing (also called word-of-mouth marketing) is the holy grail of customer acquisition. Every professional service business depends, in varying degrees, on referrals. It usually has the highest ROI of all of your marketing channels, and routinely churns out the best customer leads. For some service-based businesses, referrals deliver enough customers to keep their businesses humming. For most, referrals are just a piece of your overall pie. Whatever your customer growth strategy is, referrals should be a leading part of it.

Importance: 5/5

2. Online publicity

Find opportunities to have your business featured in publications. I am not suggesting that you hire a PR firm on retainer unless your business has the marketing dollars to support it. But there are more affordable ways to create your own PR.

As one example, there is a publicity resource called Help a Reporter Out (HARO) that connects writers looking for quotes from subject matter experts. Additionally, you can put out press releases of newsworthy news or events that you want to share about your business. Services like PRWeb and PRnewswire have packages available for small businesses.

Importance: 3/5

3. Grow traffic and increase leads with SEO

Every business should be doing some form of search engine optimization. There are basic steps that every business website should do: choose Google-friendly URLs, optimize page metatags, write strong content, build organic links, set up a Google webmaster tools account. Many service-based SMBs engage SEO consultants to supplement the basics. In general, SEO firms market on the promise of top-ranked keywords. For SEO novices, be sure to clarify what the goals of the projects are before starting—specifically, what keywords will be targeted.

Sometimes what SEO firms mean is that they will achieve top rankings for your own branded keywords. If such is the case, the bar is set much too low. They should be achieving this; in fact, you should be achieving these rankings even without their help.

As a marketer, you should be targeting competitive, non-branded keywords such as “bathroom remodeler Austin TX,” since these keywords are the ones that will drive incremental SEO leads. When you decide to invest in SEO, remember that SEO is a long-term investment, where you will not see immediate returns. The Google algorithm factors in longevity, recognizing that the natural links that it values are built over time.

Importance: 4/5

4. Content marketing

Content marketing has emerged as a significant marketing channel in the past several years. In my opinion, the rise has coincided with some changes in the Google search algorithm that rewards websites that have a high bar for content. It used to be possible to rank effectively in the search engines by composing undifferentiated content that had a high density of the desired keywords, and building artificial links to it across the web.

Those days seem to be over, and this is a good thing. For potential customers who are novices in a service provider’s area of expertise, reading (or listening to or viewing) quality content produced by that service provider can strongly influence them to learn more. Content marketing also drives organic links, and so there is certainly an SEO benefit in investing in content. Strongly consider this online marketing channel.

More articles from AllBusiness.com:

• Why You Should Be Asking Your Customers for Referrals
• How to Make Referral Partnerships Really Work for Your Business
• 8 Tips for Smarter Referral Marketing
• The Trick to Capturing More Customer Leads on Your Website

Content marketing as a channel has gotten more effective in the past several years because the quality of the commercial content being produced has risen. Larger companies regularly hire marketers with journalism backgrounds to produce informative content that matters to their core customers. As a small business service provider, the biggest advantage you have over professional writers is that you are the subject matter expert, and can speak in the first person. Use this to your advantage by finding interesting content areas related to your business.

Importance: 4/5

5. Newsletter marketing

I believe that a newsletter marketing strategy should be a key part of every service-based business. It serves as an inexpensive and effective marketing channel not only for new customers, but also for your existing client base. Companies such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, iContact, Aweber, Vertical Response, and countless others provide simple tools to build your lists and create campaigns.

Importance 5/5

6. Paid advertising

Regarding the decision to start a paid marketing campaign (such as Google AdWords), my No. 1 piece of advice for small business owners is to not “dabble” in paid marketing. If you are going to make the investment in online advertising campaigns, you should invest in putting the foundations in place that would lead to the best chance of success.

The mistake I see over and over for SMBs is an eagerness to throw a couple of hundred or thousand dollars towards online advertising, but to spend no time or money on A) the post-click conversion flow, and B) tracking the results. They see online advertising budgets as arbitrary, and track only high-level correlations between marketing budget and leads. This is an offline mindset, and leads to a low probability that the online advertising campaign will be ROI-positive and thus self-sustaining. When running a paid marketing campaign, be prepared to build a landing page, define a conversion event, and track results.

Importance: 3/5 — depending on marketing budget and effectiveness as measured by lead volume and ROI

7. Use paid listings to grow traffic and increase leads

Many service-based verticals have industry-specific online professional directories or professional associations. An example of such a directory is Lawyers.com for attorneys, AngiesList for contractors, and even down to niche categories such as TopSEOs for SEO firms. There are also the traditional yellow page companies such as SuperMedia, YellowBook, and YP.com, who have shifted their businesses online.

Listings are often sold on a subscription or fix-fee basis, which makes it incrementally harder to quantify the ROI of each channel. The challenge is that fix-fee advertising shifts the responsibility of the advertiser to translate costs to a per-visitor, per-lead, and per-customer basis.

Many directories know that their advertisers do not analyze results, and thus are able to charge a significant premium relative to the new visitors, leads, and customers they are actually delivering. If any paid listings are a sizable portion of your online marketing budget, consider tracking the results of each listing, using campaign tracking tags (which Google Analytics offers) in a similar fashion to paid advertising.

Importance: 3/5 — depending on effectiveness as measured by lead volume and ROI

8. Social media

Rather than lump social media into a channel by itself, I want to suggest that small business owners think about social media in terms of desired outcomes. Social media can also be used for brand awareness and community building. This path is less direct from a lead-generation perspective, and thus less quantifiable.

Use social media as an outlet to push out content, such as blog posts and case studies. Social media can also be used for promotion, which is a more direct form of acquiring customers. Promotions can include offering coupons and invitations to events. For small businesses without a dedicated social media marketing team, I suggest focusing more on the promotions that have a direct path to generating leads and customers.

Importance: 2/5 – although results can vary depending how social the nature of your business is

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