Getting highly targeted traffic to a website is often deemed the holy grail of internet marketing. After all, what more could you ask for than to have thousands of visitors scrambling to your website, cash in hand, begging to buy from you?
Okay, but that’s not how the real world works. And this isn’t 2002 anymore either. Back when the internet was still the wild wild west, getting highly targeted traffic was as simple as stuffing keywords and cloaking doorway pages.
But now, there’s a whole lot more internet real estate to explore. And a whole lot more users too.
It’s true that it’s harder to get true targeted traffic these days without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars. But by “harder” I mean, you’ll have to work harder - because you can still have that traffic, it just takes work.
So let’s roll up our sleeves and drum us up some high quality traffic.
What is Highly Targeted Traffic Anyways?
We need to set the stage so to speak for later when we actually begin driving traffic. At the heart of all good internet marketing are insightful questions. Is there a noticeable difference between highly targeted traffic, and keyword-specific traffic?
Absolutely!
If you are looking to generate highly targeted traffic, you might use specific long-tail keywords for you niche… or, you might just put together a video and drive traffic through YouTube.
You see, your intentions as a marketer, and your audience’s intentions as consumers need to fit together like two pieces of a puzzle. They have a specific need, and you offer the exact-match solution to them, in a way they need, at the time they need.
That’s not an easy thing to do.
Your keywords need to match your users actual intentions
You might just think, “can’t I just find all the long-tail keywords in my niche and find my audience that way?” You can find some of them that way, and you eventually will. But keywords aren’t the only way to find our audience, and don’t make you money. It’s how you use those keywords that can either make or break you.
Take a keyword, plop it into a Google search, and the results will more or less tell you what people are actually searching for - their intentions as search engine users.
Take that same keyword, pop it into Pinterest - and you’ll meet an entirely different audience - a Pinterest audience - who have similar needs but different intentions.
Take that keyword again, plug it into Twitter, and you will see yet another audience - a Twitter audience - with yet again similar needs but quite different intentions.
As I alluded to before, do you even know who your audience is? What do they really want? Where are they right now? What are they doing?
These are questions that you don’t just file under the “that would be nice to know” category. If you really want to establish your business and make long term profits online, the only way to do that is by consistently driving highly targeted traffic to your website.
But what if your target audience spends most of their time on Facebook, but you don’t like Facebook so you tweet instead? What if your target audience spends a large part of their time on Reddit, but you’d rather spend your time making videos about your niche on YouTube?
How often do you think you’ll connect with your true market audience if you don’t even know who or where they are online? If this is where you are with your online presence, getting highly targeted traffic is going to be a near impossibility.
You absolutely need to know your audience.
This is 2019. You are now competing for your targeted audience against some of the biggest major players in the industry. So if you don’t find your niche audience, I can guarantee you that your competitors will.
The Magic Formula for Finding Your True Target Audience
Okay it’s not magical. But in terms of doing what we need, it may as well be.
Finding your true target audience is the gold standard for all marketing endeavors. Whether you’re talking about old-school marketing taught in ivy league schools, to social media marketing from today’s brightest and boldest, targeting your true audience has never - and never will - go out of style.
These days we call it “building a buyer persona”.
Essentially what this involves is getting into the minds and hearts of your buyer by building a deeper picture for who they are, what they like, where they are, and what they enjoy doing.
Knowing what your audience wants and what they expect is part of building a buyer's persona.
A buyer persona is, in fact, a fictional character (or more likely, a group of characters) that you create which gives you much deeper insight into your true target audience. Often a buyer persona will incorporate such things as demographics and interests. But also more psychological factors are fleshed out too, such as buying motivations and buying concerns are determined.
Now think with me for a moment - if you as a seller of blue widgets, knew who all the people are who love your product, knew how old they were, knew what their interests were… and even knew where they often visited online - wouldn’t that give you a tremendous advantage in selling your blue widgets?
Wouldn’t you agree that having this information at your fingertips would be far more powerful for your business than just picking out some long-tail keywords?
Successful business today is all about finding and building meaningful relationships. The biggest marketers in the industry today are successful because they started at the beginning and asked themselves: who is my target audience?
Developing a buyer persona is not a hard thing to do, especially with all the tools and free resources available to us online.
Since we don’t have the space to adequately flesh out a buyers’ persona right now, I’ll refer you instead to two extremely helpful and easy to follow sources.
The first is an excellent guide by Shopify called “How to Build Buyer Personas For Better Marketing.” Just this one page will be more than enough to take you by the hand and lead you through the (simple) process of creating a buyer persona.
The second is a rather in-depth look at buyer personas by HubSpot called “How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business”. I’ve included HubSpot because they include a free downloadable template which will make your job even easier.
You’ve Got a Golden Ticket
If you’ve visited the links above and gone through the process of creating a buyer persona for your targeted audience, congratulations! You’ve got a golden ticket to success!
Seriously though, what you have right now will put you much further ahead than most of your competition. Although your personas will evolve and change over time, they will form the backbone of all your internet marketing.
Your buyer's personas will help you to tailor your content to what your audiences actually want.
Whether you need to make a video, Facebook page, blog or Pinterest account, your buyer persona will tell you everything you need to know about your audience.
It will also help you understand where you need to focus your marketing, so that your not stuck in a situation where your preferred activity is reaching no-one because your true targeted audience isn’t even there.
With the help of your buyers persona, nearly all of your marketing endeavours will become highly targeted, because you can involve so much more of your audience’s psychology.
Think of it: you now know about your target audience
- What their pain points are.
- What questions they often ask.
- Where they hang out.
- What their other interests are.
- What motivates them to buy.
- What concerns they have when looking to buy.
Because of these powerful insights, you can now pick the right social media platform for your targeted audience and address their pain points and motivations. It will not take long before you and your business become their go-to source for their needs.
Now that you’ve got your buyer persona ready, here are some quick pointers you’ll need to ensure that you do engage your target audience properly, and that you can generate higher responses and conversions.
Use a Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is simply a product that you giveaway for free to interested prospect in exchange for their email address. This can be an ebook that you’ve written, a video series, or a report that addresses the motivating pain-points of your audience.
When they’ve downloaded or otherwise accessed your lead magnet, be sure to continue redirect them back to your other content or newsletter. The more interactions you can have with your audience the better.
Do Guest Posts on Industry Blogs
Sometimes you’ll find that your targeted audience likes to hang out on other blogs online. Here is where you’ll want to arrange to do a series of guest posts on these blogs. Not only is this a great way to brand yourself, but you’ll also find that your own following begins to grow exponentially after being featured on a large niche blog.
Buy Targeted Ad Campaigns
Ads and media buys can provide an excellent ROI
This can sound scary, especially if you’ve never done it before. But remember, because you’ve got your buyer’s persona, you should be able to craft excellent headlines and ad copy for highly targeted traffic.
It’s beyond the scope of this post to talk about ad campaigns, but WordStream has an excellent assortment of free white papers ranging from ppc ads to landing page ideas. Download their guides here: https://www.wordstream.com/white-papers
In Conclusion
Driving highly targeted traffic to your website is a lot of work, so don’t make it any harder than it needs to be. Your focus, especially at the beginning, is to lay a foundational work for all your future marketing efforts.
Building a buyers persona may sound more like something an ad company would do, but in today’s ultra-competitive internet marketplace, it’s the only way to survive and thrive.
When other company’s, small businesses, and even sole proprietorships are sinking in the near future, the solid base you build today will reward you with highly targeted traffic and conversions for years to come.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://trafficelements.com/2019/08/29/a-sure-fire-method-for-achieving-highly-targeted-traffic/
Congratulations @mlindley! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPVote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!