How to get noticed online

Andrew Langridge of eTrader explains how to drive traffic to your new website

One of the questions we get asked time and time again is ‘How can we let people know about our new website?”

Driving traffic to your website can be done using both online and offline marketing. In an ideal world, you need to implement a mixture of the two to ensure both existing customers and new customers are visiting your website and placing orders or enquiring.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) Your website should be constructed in line with technical SEO criteria set out by guidelines and have high-quality content in place to ensure that your new site gets found by as many relevant search engine result pages (SERPs) as possible. A new site that is constructed well and with these in place should start having increased levels of traffic and visitors.

Social media marketing This is perhaps one of the most affordable and easiest ways to promote your new website. A great way to generate awareness and spark intrigue with your existing customer base is to run a social media ‘teaser’ campaign or a countdown. Make your audience curious by developing some interesting and eye-catching content that ensures your posts are one of the first they look out for. Once the site is live, interact with your customer base: point them to your new website and get them on-site with some special promotions that are exclusive offers for social media channel followers. This identifies the strength of your various social media campaigns and can help analyse where your traffic/leads are coming from.

Email marketing This ties in with the last point. Use your existing customer database to create a buzz: tease your customers about the new site and what it will offer. Again, create targeted (and therefore measurable) offers within your campaign for ‘email campaign customers’ and ‘existing customers’.

Public relations To launch a new website most of your efforts will be digital, but you should also complement this with some traditional public relations (PR) coverage. Send press releases to various local magazines, trade publications, websites and blogs to see what coverage you can get.

Read the different publications first to ensure you pick the right angle to approach them with – is there a specific section your story might fit into? A local paper will be interested in the local business angle, whereas a trade magazine might be interested in the new machines you’ve bought, and a website might be more interested in the new range of T-shirts that you’re offering. Are you having a launch party? Invite the local and trade press and remember to take good, high-resolution pictures for them to use.

A well targeted, well written press release will often get used, resulting in increased exposure for your business ‘offline’ – and also online, where the coverage will be shared via social media both by yourself and, hopefully, by the magazines and papers.

These tips, combined with SEO, will soon drive high-quality traffic to your site and ensure it starts reaching its potential.