Does your website provide your business with a never-ending source of qualified leads? Are your sales team’s days filled with working to convert these leads instead of going out and prospecting?
In short, is your company’s website a valuable asset?
Or, like so many, does it do little more than add overhead to your annual budget?
If it’s the latter, don’t worry. Just make it your New Year’s resolution to finally change things around and start seeing an actual ROI on your company’s website by implementing the right online marketing strategies.
3 Online Marketing Strategies That You Must Implement in 2019
The Internet is overflowing with endless suggestions for how to drive traffic to your company’s website. All those online marketing strategies can even be a bit overwhelming, which might be why you’ve had trouble putting any of them into action.
Fortunately, you only need to focus on three of them. Later, if you want, you can expand to try out all kinds of new ideas, but for now – until your lead-generation is full and your sales team is happy – the three below should be your priorities.
1. Start Networking to Increase Your Content’s Circulation
Most online marketing strategies fall incredibly short when it comes to content marketing.
These strategies tell you to put a lot of time and effort into creating great content. They often tell you to post regularly, too.
But that very obvious advice is usually about it.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of online marketers don’t see a lot of success from such a simple approach.
The truth is that the companies that are successfully generating traffic on a regular basis are also networking like crazy. They’re literally reaching out to other companies in their market – excluding competitors, obviously – and forming relationships that breed opportunities to guest post on their sites. This is known as blogger outreach, and if you’re not already doing, 2019 is the time to start. In fact, 2019 is the time to make this kind of outreach a regular priority for your company.
This means consistently reaching out to those other companies knowing that it could take months before they actually allow you an opportunity to post on their site. That kind of timeline is why you need to get started ASAP to start seeing results in 2019.
The good news is that once you build a relationship with another company, it will be much easier to continue posting on their site in the future. Likewise, showing a prospective company that another website loves posting your content will make it much easier to get your foot in the door.
2. Quit Reinventing the Wheel and Start Going After the Competition
Another reason a lot of online marketing strategies fall flat on their faces is that they start from complete scratch. Marketers do keyword research, see where the opportunities seem to lie, and then come up with topics they think their prospects will enjoy reading about.
Then, they see if they were right.
Usually, they’re not and need to start over.
In 2019, quit going around in circles. Chances are you already have competitors that are doing well, right?
If so, use a premium SEO software like SEMrush or Ahrefs to analyze their sites. Specifically, you want to look at three things:
- The keywords they’re ranking for
- The topics they’re using to rank them
- Where they’re getting their backlinks from
The first one is easy, as both platforms can show you this in a matter of seconds.
The second takes a little extra work but is vital. You need to actually click on the pages (the software provides the URLs) to find out what your competition is talking about when they use these keywords. This will give you a sense for both what Google associates with those keywords and what your audience wants to know about.
Finally, finding out where their backlinks come from will show you which sites to approach for the same opportunities. Again, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
While you still need to be original with your content and should think about how you can go above and beyond what your competition has (e.g. skyscraper posts), this kind of approach will make all of your online marketing strategies in 2019 go a lot smoother.
3. Start Regularly Creating the Most Shareable Content
Another really powerful way to increase traffic to your site is to invest in three specific types of content:
- Videos
- Long-Form Content
- Infographics
All of these play a major role in the online marketing strategies of companies that are seeing massive amounts of traffic.
The reason is simple: other people love sharing them.
Videos and infographics may come as no surprise. Both do a good job of conveying large sums of information in an easily digestible manner.
However, as it turns out, people really love sharing long-form content. Aim to create posts that are at least 3,000 words as much as possible (without adding unnecessary information) and then pushing these posts across all of your social channels.
Google loves them because they tend to be better resources with more keywords. If you can get social media followers to love them, too, you’ll quickly find a lot of traffic just starts showing up on your website.
How to Apply These Online Marketing Strategies in 2019
Now that you know which online marketing strategies matter the most in 2019, all you have to do is start applying them, right?
If that seems easier said than done, then start small.
Begin by using those aforementioned platforms to analyze your competition. Then, start networking with any sites that are giving them backlinks. Then, start creating content (video, infographics, or long-form content) on the same topics they’re covering. The blog posts will be especially helpful because you can use them as examples when looking for guest posting opportunities.
After that, it’s just a matter of remaining consistent with your content creation and doubling down on what your market enjoys most.
Before you know it, you’ll have leads beating a path to your “door”, which means huge profits in 2019.