Masterclass: Increase high-quality traffic to your website

Joe: Hello and welcome to this Lead Forensics webinar entitled Masterclass: Increase High Quality Traffic to your Website. I am Brand Awareness Manager and host, Joe Ducarreaux. If you were to ask any marketer or entrepreneur on the planet what they’d like more of, they’ll generally say more customers. But what comes frequently after that? More traffic to their website. If you find driving enough relevant traffic to your website to be a constant battle, you’re not alone. 61% of your fellow marketers named this as their biggest overall challenge. So with this in mind, we’ve gathered together an expert panel of speakers for today’s discussion and we guarantee you’re going to come away with some actionable tips that you can apply straightaway to get results. So please meet Carl Hewitt, CEO and co-founder of Hewitt Matthews. Hi Carl!

Carl: Hi Joe, thanks for having me,

Joe: We have Charles Barkham, Senior Strategist from Punch B2B. Hi Charles.

Charles: Hi Joe, Thanks for having me.

Joe: Sarah Townsend, Head of MarTech and Digital Experiences at The Croc. Hi, Sarah.

Sarah: Hiya, thanks for having me.

Joe: and Claire Daniels, CEO of Trio Media.

Claire: Hi, pleasure to be here.

Joe: And last but not least, Steve Yates, Head of Marketing from Egnyte. Hi Steve.

Steve: Hi Joe, how are you doing?

Joe: Very good, thank you. All the better for speaking to all of you guys. So thanks for joining us. Let’s jump straight into it. So we’re here to run through the high impact tactics guaranteed to drive more relevant traffic. So there’s essentially two ways to drive traffic to your website. The first is free with search engine optimization, blogs, content, organic reach from social media. The second way is paid, which gets results at a premium. So in your experience, where have you seen success in driving traffic to your websites? It’d be great to hear what you focus on. Give some examples of what has and hasn’t worked for you. So I think, Steve, should we start with you for that one?

Steve: OK sure. So we’re still a relatively new company and we’re doing something innovative. So we do rely quite a lot on paid search today. I’d say it’s probably 2/3 paid and one 1/3 organic. So a lot of work that we do, field marketing, content syndication is driving that organic traffic but we do rely quite heavily on paid search today.

Joe: Charles, is it a similar story for you?

Charles: Yeah, as a company ourselves, we are a B2B agency. So primarily for us, we do a lot of organic social. We tend to do a lot of thought leadership type pieces. So organic kind of makes a lot of sense for us in terms of trying to get to the community and the likes. But for our clients, a lot of the time we do a lot of paid outreach to drive specific messages to certain audiences. So we do tend to see a kind of mix of both in our agency.

Joe: So did you say it was an even mix or is it sort of weighted like Steve said it was ?

Charles: Yes so definitely for our internal marketing, we definitely focus a lot more on organic but for our clients, it’s definitely a lot more on the paid side.

Joe: And Claire, a similar story for you or slightly different?

Claire: We say we’ll mix and it’s always going to depend on the audience. We work with a range of businesses across B2B and B2C from like e-commerce through to tech and recruitment and everything in between. So it’s going to depend who your target audience is and where they’re spending time and obviously you can’t reach them organically, that’s when you’re going to go through a paid route. So paid social, paid search can be really great if you don’t have huge followings organically on social media or organically on Google, for example. But the goal really for most businesses is certainly to get more traffic coming through organic then coming through paid. So obviously the cost per acquisition becomes a lot lower but you can still get those volumes of traffic through. So definitely longer term, I think businesses should be aiming for an organic strategy that fills that traffic. But yeah, it really depends, you know. We have Startups who come to us and in order to get them in front of their customers from day one, you’re going to have to go down a paid strategy route, really.

Joe: So, in terms of social media bits, the organic stuff. Carl, I think I’ll come to you on this one. In your experience, can you make social media work in terms of driving traffic or does it not necessarily work quite as well for B2B?

Carl: Yeah, you absolutely can, I think it’s a common misconception. The problem we see is people forget how long the sales cycle is when it comes to B2B marketing and so they think it’s going to work like B2C. And if you chuck some content out, great, you’ll get some visitors, some hits and some conversions. But it’s such a long process, 9 times out of 10. It’s just understanding the audience you’re talking to and how long it’s going to take to come through is really the key thing. But hands down, LinkedIn advertising and organic content, I think everyone here can attest just how powerful that can be if it’s done properly. When you leverage LinkedIn paid ads….we’re a paid media company…… so you leverage Lead Forensics and LinkedIn paid ads, it’s just incredible but it takes that kind of expertise and time to get it right, I think.

Joe: Absolutely I think that’s a fantastic point you make. So then how can you bring content to life in an impactful way to drive web traffic then? So does anyone want to volunteer on that one?

Sarah: Yeah, I’ll take this one. So obviously, content is more important than it’s ever been to users. As we know, the B2B buying journey it’s not simple, it’s not linear. There’s hardly ever one person involved in that decision and that journey. So it’s really important to deliver content that really cuts through at each point in the journey. So, you know, whether it’s at the sort of awareness stage or the consideration or helping users to sort of make that purchase. It’s about finding the right content by looking and understanding your audience and where they are within that journey and creating the content that supports where they are within the journey and delivers that sort of contextual messaging to them further along that journey to purchase.

Claire: I would also add to that, if I can. So you talk about bringing content to life, one of the key ways to do that is video and a lot of brands are still scared of creating video content or think it’s going to be really costly or take a lot of time and effort to produce. But actually what we’ve seen more of is user generated content, you know TikTok, reels, the type of stuff that is very organic and can just be recorded on a phone, doesn’t take huge production. So certainly when we’re looking at bringing content to life, harnessing video is absolutely the way to go to kind of engage your audience and get them engaging with your brand, engaging with your posts on social media for longer. You know, if they’re watching a video rather than just scrolling through one organic post. So yeah, that’s definitely a really cute way.

Joe: I think you’re absolutely right. Claire, that is an excellent point. I think something else that occurs to me with sort of social media platforms, that’s kind of like my background and bits and pieces that I work in. It does seem that quite a lot of the social media platforms now are just trying to emulate TikTok, you see what I mean? So like everybody’s got that sort of the scroll up and you’ve got quick fire videos just all coming through. So no, you’re absolutely right. Steve, your thoughts on that one? How can you bring content to life? Is it just videos? Have you got any other examples? What works for you?

Steve: I think what I’ve found in the B2B space is, it’s about having the right content for the right audience as well. So for example, we work with media companies quite a lot and we find that infographics, so links through to infographics are working better for that group. With the life science audience, we’re doing white papers and sort of longer form technical information. In the construction space, they seem to like webinars more. So it isn’t that, in my experience, it isn’t one thing that works. It’s not, you know, blue or yellow or green and you obviously always have to always be testing. It’s about really understanding what it is that your customer likes to consume and then putting the right content in front of them.

Joe: Absolutely so making it absolutely appropriate for that person at that point in the journey, I suppose, as well. Charles, any more thoughts?

Charles: Yeah, I agree with everything everyone said. I think I’d also add that I think just really strong creative is essential to anything you’re doing. If you think about the type of platforms, you maybe using Linkedin, Google, whatever it is ……. you need to catch the attention of the people that you’re going after. You might catch them at the right time, in the right place but if they scroll past it then you’ve lost them almost. Something that really stands out, consider what your competitors are doing, consider how visually striking your ads are and all of those types of things. But yeah, I would say creative is something that, especially in the B2B space, has often sometimes been neglected as well. It seems to me a lack of full size marketing outside of the B2C space, but yeah, it’s 100% something that needs to have a real focus on, especially with the content creation and the ads you’re putting out.

Joe: Carl, you were smiling and nodding your head a lot during that. I’m guessing you’re pretty much in agreement with Charles. Do you have anything more to add on that one?

Carl: Yeah, I totally agree with what everyone said and what Charles was saying there as well. If you’ve got the right audience, the right timing, the right message, great. But if it doesn’t look good, it’s not going to be scroll stopping, people will carry on. I think another thing we were talking about in the office actually this week, was around when we work with a lot of clients we tend to put together…. and this kind of links I suppose to all the points but…… a bit of a persona messaging matrix. So, Google did some research in 2021, it was 43% of B2B purchases now involve eight or more stakeholders, which is 8 or more different people with different drivers as to why they’re going to buy from you. So it’s like your content, you’re creative and what you’re saying and your messaging needs to be tailored to each of them and then …..Sarah to your point as well…….what point they are in the buying cycle because the CFO will really only going to care about one thing and that’s the money, the Marketing Director is going to care about how many leads it’s going to get them or whatever else. So figuring out what message do you need to put through to each persona and then tailoring your content to that as well is really key.

Sarah: Yeah, I totally agree. Totally agree with Carl. I think going back to that stage in the journey, you know, when you’re looking at the awareness stage, people may not be interested in viewing content that is too heavy. If it’s a brand awareness piece and you’re trying to educate people about your brand but they’re moving through their consideration phase, it’s about providing content potentially that is more sort of educational. So, you know, to Charles’s point about the sort of thought leadership pieces, case studies, white papers and then potentially serving up demos when it comes to the right point. Letting users self serve viewing demos, if that works for them because it’s about creating that tipping point between marketing and sales where actually that contact or that lead, if you like, is ready to be spoken to and your sales team then have all the dynamite they need to be able to speak to that lead or customer and with a lot of ammunition.

Joe: Absolutely again, more excellent points. I do hope our audience is writing all these down just to sort of ‘Right well, I’m going to definitely start doing this from now on’. Carl, you mentioned something just there, which is at the forefront of my mind being the Brand Awareness Manager for Lead Forensics. You mentioned pattern break. So you’re scrolling through and then suddenly what’s the one thing that you stop and you go, hang on a minute, what’s that? So just to give an example of something that I had recently…. there was a video which again, I was just scrolling through just looking for sort of, you know, comparative bits…..and there was a video which had one of the best pattern breaks I’ve ever seen because it was a picture of a guy who had sort of phrenology charts drawn on his skull. Then it said, ‘are you still selling based on head size?’ Then the title of the video was ‘how Ford used to sell cars based on head size’ and then it went to this brilliant video just explaining all this sort of thing. So what sort of things do you think make an impactful pattern break? What is it? What examples do you have of having put something up that has worked for you in that sort of way? Or have you seen something out in the world yourself?

Carl: Yeah, and that’s a really good point. Pattern break is such an important thing, it’s that scroll stopping, all of that kind of content you get out there. There are best practices on LinkedIn, you know, really colourful, keep your brand prominent but don’t go overbearing with your brand. They’re more interested in what you’re offering. Don’t go text heavy, data and charts are really helpful. But also it really comes down to understanding your audience and segmenting that up like we talked about and getting something that’s going to resonate with them. I think the best example for me is, we ran a campaign for an IT company and they wanted us to run these very specific infographics and it was a very kind of….this is what we want, this is what we’re going to run. So we said, fine but can we just syphon off some budget and try something ourselves because we’ve got an idea that we think will work. This was a few years ago when the new Star Wars films were out. We were going after this really specific job title and we’d done some research and we sort of looked into some insights and that was a big thing with our target audience in the space. So the adverts we ran just had huge pictures of Baby Yoda, right? Because that was what was popular at the time. We looked across all of the adverts, what generated the most clicks, engagements and at the end, the most conversions and it was this picture of Baby Yoda. Because if you’re scrolling through LinkedIn and it’s like anti-phishing software or whatever, whatever, it gets boring and then suddenly Baby Yoda is there. That’s what you just watched last week with friends…..it changes it and that’s a real pattern break. So it is about that understanding as well and making sure you know how to resonate and stop them from scrolling.

Joe: There is a reason that I’m smiling quite a lot and that’s because if I just do this.

Carl: Oh, Yes. Brilliant

Joe: It’s almost like we planned that Carl. That was fantastic. Does anyone else have any sort of really good examples of pattern breaks? Anyone want to volunteer? Any that they’ve seen?

Charles: I’ll talk. I won’t go into an example but I agree with Carl completely, not only in knowing your audience but just differentiating in the sense that you mentioned Carl about seeing the same thing but then seeing something completely different. That’s not necessarily something that’s relevant to your audience but it’s just different from what they’re seeing currently. If they’re in a certain space and they’re seeing the same competitors. Someone mentioned life science earlier as a sector, if they’re seeing close-ups, stock imagery of vials and people in lab coats and stuff, seeing that constantly and then if they see something that’s quite different in terms of a creative style on your page, then you can stand out and kind of cause that pattern break. So not only knowing your audience but also kind of try and differentiate from what they’re seeing currently as well.

Carl: Yeah, there’s a quote…. it’s about what your audience wants to see, not what you’re trying to sell them and it’s a very different approach to it rather than, this is my stuff, buy it. Suddenly you think that buys you the golden ticket to getting your invoices signed off. It’s a case of, well what do they want to see and what do they want to know about? …..and then catering to that. So yeah, totally agree, Charles that’s spot on.

Claire: It’s so funny because I didn’t know there was an official quote of that but I always say it’s about what people want to hear, not what you want to tell them. So yeah, same thing. I think there can be quite a different split here between organic and paid that we were talking about earlier because obviously paid people aren’t necessarily expecting to see content from your company. So you do have to stand out a lot more in those aspects. However, if it’s organic and you’re scrolling through, you know, this is a really simple one but actually something we see time and time again that works so well for businesses…. is posts with your actual people in, get far more engagement than anything else. That seems so simple but again look at your own stats, what’s engaging people? What do people like to see? Do more of that and actually put people at the forefront, if that’s what differentiates you? Obviously no one has your team so it is an immediate differentiator even though it sounds so simple. So things like that work really well organically because those people are already that little bit more engaged because they’re following you. So they want to know your story and they want to know a bit more. So you’ve got an opportunity to kind of message things a little bit differently to your organic followers versus you paid ads. But I absolutely agree with Charles and Carl from the paid side. I also actually heard someone say recently with regard to TikToks because obviously you’ve got so little time to engage with your audience, even starting midway through your first word or your first couple of words is going to capture people because they’re already getting the gist of what you’re saying…….rather than they go on and it’s breath in and then start talking, they’re like I’m already bored. I’ve gone past, you know. I know a lot of B2B businesses might be thinking, yeah, great, but TikTok is not for me. I’d say it probably is and also you mentioned earlier, Joe, about how everyone’s going that way. The one thing I keep saying to people is that everyone wishes they were there in the early days of Instagram and go, ‘oh, I wish I could have capitalised on Instagram and grow my followers whilst I could’. That opportunity is here and now on TikTok to get on it because this is going to be the platform. So getting on there and just creating some fun, unique content is going to be really important.

Carl: If you’ve got logos at the start of your video, literally seconds of logos, take it out. No one cares….in the nicest way.

Claire: Why does everyone want the logo on everything and make it bigger. It’s a standard thing that’s in agency life, like…… can I have the logo on it? Can the logo be bigger? No.

Joe: You’re absolutely right. Get your people in it and that seems to definitely drive much more engagement. So quite often people will visit B2B websites to find out more but they won’t necessarily enquire. So how do you go about recognizing intent without the conversion at that stage? So Steve will come to you and then Sarah, I’m aware that you guys haven’t had a chance to speak quite so much yet, so we’ll go Steve and then Sarah, if that’s OK.

Steve: I probably don’t have the strongest opinion here. So what we tend to do when people come to the website, they’ll engage with chats and then we take it from there. We’re not doing a lot of intent based targeting today. Maybe we need to talk to Lead Forensics a little bit more in that space. I rely on trying to share stories with people and trying to share the right content and then they’ll come back when they’re ready, rather than looking at are they ready? and they’re giving off the right signals. So I don’t have a lot of insight in that space.

Joe: OK well, that’s absolutely fine. Thank you, Sarah. Let’s come across to you.

Sarah: I guess it depends what your strategy is again. So if you’re looking at a sort of organic strategy obviously understanding search intent is essential. Understanding whether a user is looking at an informational request or a transactional request and then tailoring the sort of experience based on that and creating your pillar pages or landing pages that support those sorts of queries is really important. But there are intent platforms that can help you to understand what users are doing before they’re actually engaging with your site. So understanding what their behaviours are, what their interests are, where they’re active. These sorts of platforms obviously require budget but they can be really powerful in a B2B sense in being able to serve up personalised experiences on site. But I think a key element is, you can drive as much traffic to your site as you want via organic and paid but you have to make sure that the experience when they get there is right, is fast, is accessible and meets the criteria that it does to sort of ensure that……. a user could potentially go away, as you say, if they don’t convert they could engage with a piece of content on your site and then if their experience isn’t great, they’ll go away and they won’t come back. They’ll go and search for a competitor. But for example, if your digital experience is optimised, you’ve got more chance of that user then going away after they’ve engaged with a particular piece of content on your site, whether it’s a video, a case study, white paper and then coming back nudged a little bit further towards purchase or they’ve shared information with a colleague and that colleague then picks up and then potentially does a sort of value exchange on site. So assessment tools are a great way of doing that. Ask the user for information, data capture and then in exchange you provide them with a personalised report, for example. Understanding intent is important, obviously, but it’s also really essential that the experience is great as well so that they can come back after they’ve made that initial touchpoint.

Joe: Absolutely, we had Chris Murray on a little while ago and he said that your website absolutely should be the embodiment of your best salesperson. So if you know, there’s a piece of content on there that’s super clear about exactly what it is that you’re selling, why they should buy from you, solving their problem and everything. It’s half the battle, isn’t it? So does anyone have anything more to add on that one?

Claire: I would just add kind of to complement what Sarah said. Definitely the keywords can be a really powerful tool here in that intent. So looking at what people were searching when they landed on your site. This is a PPC agency and anyone that deals with PPC knows how powerful negative keywords are to ruling out the people you don’t want or traffic you don’t want to pay for. We’ve got a list of thousands of keywords that we put into our negative list as standard because we know that if that term is included in their search, they’re not ready to buy. So on a PPC campaign, we only want to pay for traffic that is searching with an intent to buy based on the language and what they’re typing in. Obviously, with organic search, you can be a bit more open to driving traffic through because you’re not paying per click. But yeah, that keyword piece is super valuable and then definitely agree that the experience once you drive them there because ………. you mentioned it at the start, Joe, everyone wants more sales but then a piece of that is traffic. If anyone’s on here, it’s about getting more traffic. Well, why do you want more traffic? And let’s look at every part of the journey because you could get more traffic but it’s not necessarily going to get you more sales. So you need to get the right traffic in or take the existing traffic you’re getting and convert it better based on that experience once they land on your site.

Joe: Would you consider on site conversion the only KPI for the quality of your traffic?

Carl: If you could weigh in on that one. I think it’s really (inaudible). A point Sara touched on earlier with the self serve and (inaudible) with B2B, that is becoming bigger and bigger. People do so much more of their own research and comparisons of different products before they make a decision and get to the point where they just want to buy with their own autonomy. As part of that they’re giving away so many different valuable pieces of data and behaviours and actions that you need to be tracking that aren’t just that final last click touch point. We run a campaign, we track so many KPIs from both on platform and on page. So like on Facebook, for example, their ad relevance metric is more of an in-platform metric but your bounce rate is something that’s more about your website. But each one gives you so much information about how well your ads are performing but also where they’re not performing and where they’re falling down because all of the metrics are interlinked. If your click through rate is really low, your engagement is really low, your impressions are really high. It means a lot of people are seeing it, but no-one is engaging with it so your content is probably rubbish or your audience isn’t right. You know, in that kind of stuff, you need to be looking at all your metrics and then conversion wise, if someone’s downloading a white paper or they’re spending 2 minutes on a blog article. You can track that conversion action, run that through Google Ads as an event, cause it to fire in Google ads and then you can start to use Google’s AI to optimise that sort of positive behaviour. All of that is so valuable, it’s what we call micro conversions (inaudible) start building on that and it’s so important to look at those rather than just the last click.

Joe: Well, yes, it’s definitely a much more in-depth look at what it is exactly to be scoring yourself on, I suppose, Steve, I noticed you were making a few notes while we were listening to Carl there. Have you got something to add? Please feel free to jump in.

Steve: I’m making notes of things that I need to do better.

Joe: So that’s what we promised. That’s done.

Steve: We don’t do that as well as we should today. So most of the time we’re driving people towards doing online demos and then signing up for free trials and I don’t do a lot of intent based targeting today. So yeah, I was making some notes and I might have to talk to Carl later about some better ways to do things.

Joe: We promised valuable content. I’m really pleased that even amongst ourselves we’re all learning something. So that’s fantastic.

Steve: What I think about……. It’s not about driving more traffic… so my sales team isn’t asking me for more leads, they’re always asking me for better leads. They want better interactions, they don’t want more. So that’s the most important thing for me right now, is to make sure that our targeting is right, that we’re talking to the right people, to the right things. I don’t just want to turn and get 60 million people pinging our website on a Monday because that’s not going to help. So getting the right people to interact is core.

Joe: Hopefully, as Carl was saying there, where people are becoming more and more autonomous and doing their research, hopefully that does narrow it down slightly. But yeah, I can imagine that is a pretty tricky one to navigate. So there are many different ways of actually driving traffic to your website. How do you know exactly when to change things up, when something maybe isn’t quite working quite as well as we thought. How would you go about deciding, OK, let’s do something different. Sarah, should we come to you on that one?

Sarah: Yeah I think it’s just down to data, data, data. What is the data telling you around what’s working, what’s not working, what’s being engaged with, where users are dropping off, where they’re experiencing pain points. There’s a plethora of tools that can help you to do that, as well as ones that are part of your own stack. I think it’s really about consistently measuring data across all of your activity to sort of see where you need to dial things up, dial things down, change things, where you may need to implement AB testing, for example. It’s just really sort of keeping on top of it really and just monitoring things on a regular basis, making sure that you’re switching things up and testing it and just seeing how that impacts the data. Because at the end of the day, data is King.

Joe: Data is King OK, everybody, Steve, get your notebook out. Make a note of that one as well. Charles, we’ll come to you with the same question. So how do we know when to change things up?

Charles: When it’s not working anymore. But yeah, I mean, there’s so many different things to think about depending on what’s not working……like do you want to expand your audience wider if you’re not seeing the type of results you’re expecting, do you put more budget if you’re not seeing the type of results you’re expecting? Could it be again, sorry, if I sound like I’m banging the drum here but creative, do you need to mix that up? If you’re doing a brand campaign, for example, do you need to stay consistent in the creative you’re doing but try just mixing it up in terms of the actual ads you’re putting out and refresh those on a bi-monthly basis, whatever it may be. Do you need to come up with a whole new idea if it’s kind of run its course? And again, as Sarah alluded to, you’ll see that within the metrics and be able to identify that. It kind of depends on the area, like you said, whether it’s the audience, whether it’s the creative.

Joe: I’m sorry, Claire. I was looking at you. I thought you were sort of leaning up to your mic to say something. Please, go ahead.

Claire: So I agree with everything that’s been said so far, but also it’s about not necessarily stopping but changing and listening to the language of Charles and Sarah, that’s what they’re saying. I think that’s the easy thing, like if you’re not seeing results, people think we’ll stop doing that thing but it’s actually about assessing and trying something different. Being agile, being able to pivot, do something different. You know, if you’ve not generated good results from the Google ads, for example, it doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t work for you and you need to switch them off. You might need new keywords, new creative, new content, whatever it may be. So yeah, I think sometimes rash decisions are made, sometimes that doesn’t work, so stop. But it’s definitely more a case of pivoting and what might not work for you one time might work for another depending on what industry you’re in, seasonality could affect it. You know, your customer buying behaviours could affect the way things are working. So there’s so many elements you have to take into account. It’s about knowing all of that. That’s what obviously Sarah means when she’s talking about the data. What are all your different data points that you can reference that will allow you to make decisions on what is and isn’t working for you?

Joe: So it’s sort of shifting your focus into, I guess an example of that would be so this customer wants to buy in this particular way. So that’s how we’re going to sell to those people, not necessarily just trying to do the same thing over and over again. You just go, yeah, yeah, carry on.

Charles: I think you need to give it time as well. You need to (inaudible) at least until it has had its course before you do anything drastic like Claire said before you kind of pull the plug. It is changing, not pulling out. I’m also a big fan of the ‘fail fast, fail often’ mentality as well……Like get out there, do it and if it doesn’t work, then just change it up. But don’t just….., try it, it doesn’t work, OK? It failed. It’s just going, failing and failing again until you get it right.

Joe: Absolutely! Carl, any thoughts on this one? So how much value do you assign to sort of experimenting and testing in terms of knowing when to change things up then?

Carl: Yeah, a huge amount because as far as I know and Claire was saying, as well, I think for me, the thing is with marketing, it’s about having an understanding of the people you’re engaging with and trying to talk to and communicate with. So you’ve got to see where insights lead all the time. If Google Ads works today considering that there’s no huge changes to the platform, it will work tomorrow, all things being equal. The thing that will change is the audience because that’s an entity that’s just constantly evolving and changing. So you’ve got to be really insights led to understand what they want? Where are they? What do they want to hear from me? How do they want to hear it? So we always allocate a good amount of budget for campaigns testing. Like I said, with this IT company, if we can allocate some extra budget to try to submit some kind of wild card creative, that’s different to everything else that they’ve got and say, right, let’s try this. That’s where the real gems have come from as well, is stuff that you didn’t expect. At the same thing in a financial planning campaign recently where one of the creative assets we used was so different to everything else but that was the one that performed the best. So testing is really, really important because that’s the way that you find what does and doesn’t work. I think the key thing to remember is, especially if you’re AB testing, try to only change one thing at a time otherwise you’re not going to know what variable caused the eventual impact. People change their copy and their creative and they go, ‘oh, great, it worked’. But actually it was one of the two that might have done it and you got to test again. So just kind of sticking to one variable at a time is the really key thing.

Joe: That’s a great point. It makes a lot of sense. We have actually been sent a question from the audience. So, Steve, prepare yourself. I’m going to come to you for this one. How do you get high quality traffic to your site on a non-existent budget? So we’ll go to each of you if you’ve got one tip, that would be smashing. Steve, your thoughts?

Steve: I think the key is to appear on lots of webinars and make sure you get welcomed without having to pay or be paid for it. But I think the social angle is really, really strong. It’s a way of building your brand without having to spend money on ads. That’s my top tip.

Carl: My point of view was just kind of around you need to be really consistent with what you’re doing and don’t……. if it doesn’t work within a month of posting five times a week……. don’t give up on it just yet. You’ve got to keep cracking on because it might not be the fact that people are liking, commenting and engaging but actually if you look at the stats and the analytics, it’s probably people still coming through your site. Look at the difference if you post on LinkedIn 20,000 views and 100 likes, it’s a very different ratio. People are seeing it and clicking through but don’t just base it on the likes and have that consistency long term and it will definitely come.

Joe: Thanks very much. Sarah, you go next?

Sarah: I think, yeah, just being consistent across your channels really can also help. Steve was saying how important social can be from an organic sense but just making sure that your messaging, your creative and everything else is consistent across whatever channels you’re using.

Joe: Yeah consistency and yeah again, hammering the same point home. But it is an excellent point to be making. 100% I think. Charles, I’ll come to you.

Sarah: ….and I was just going to say about that, making sure that your website is set to be crawlable as well, as crawlable as possible and making sure that it is, as we were saying earlier, fit for purpose and a good experience.

Joe: Yeah, sleek and shiny.

Charles: I was going to echo what Carl and Sarah said really in terms of consistency. Building a brand or regardless if you’re doing that, especially on social takes time and takes time to build an audience and get organic if you’re not using paid or have little budgets. So yeah, stick with it and be consistent to your brand and try and do something different.

Claire: I agree with what has been said but also just to offer a different perspective. So if you have no budget, can you borrow someone else’s budget or platform? You know, reach out to people that, you know, like the power of networking. Do you know someone else who could promote your business? Do you have a connection with another company that could provide a link back on their website to your website that could drive traffic? So really tap into the people that you know to borrow their space in what they’re doing. Obviously, this could be like influencers, sending them a free gift, getting them to post back on their platform. So there’s loads of ways with no budget you can tap into large audiences by reaching out to the people that already have that audience and engaging with them and borrowing some of their space.

Charles: Someone mentioned it earlier as well but the people in your company, they’ve already got an audience. So if they’re comfortable with doing it, using them as a vessel to promote your company or brand and building out that way as well.

Joe: Thank you very much for your quickfire tips on our audience question, guys. So just very quickly, I’m just going to give everyone a little reminder that today’s webinar is brought to you by Lead Forensics, software that in essence tells you who has been visiting your website and providing you with valuable contact information so you can close those deals. This has been a really, really interesting chat. You’ve shown a lot of experience and a lot of great points have come out of it and hopefully everybody’s got something to take away from it. But if there was one key takeaway, to take away on driving high quality traffic to your website. What would that be? So we’ll start with Sarah, if that’s OK. What is your one key takeaway?

Sarah: I think that if you can do so, mix your paid and organic activity. So learn from your paid activity. What you can garner from that and bring that over into your organic strategy. It’s really valuable.

Joe: Thank you very much, Sarah. It’s been brilliant having you on. Thank you so much for your input. That’s fantastic, Carl. We’ll come to you next.

Carl: Yeah I think my point is segmentation and making sure that regardless, as Sarah said, you should definitely be mixing the two. Regardless of what channels and platforms you’re using in what way, make sure you’re segmenting up who you’re talking to, whether that’s where they are in the journey, what their drivers are based on their job title and position in the company and their familiarity with your product or service and really tailor that down. If you’re selling B2C, you spend so much time understanding that person to the Nth degree, whereas in B2B you’ve got to do that 10 times with the people involved in the purchase. So make sure you’re doing that properly.

Joe: Yeah, it’s not always an easy task, but yes, absolutely. I think it is critical. So thank you very much for your point in there, Carl. It’s fantastic. Steve, let’s come over to you. What is your one golden rule for driving high quality traffic to your website?

Steve: I think always be testing, keep your creative moving around and have a plan B.

Joe: Have a plan B- that’s always valuable advice. I think that’s fantastic. Steve, thank you so much for that. Charles, we’ll come to you next. What’s your absolute golden rule for driving high quality traffic to your website?

Charles: I’ve said it about five times today but just do something different, something interesting, something creative that they’re not going to expect to see or something that they’re not likely to have seen before.

Joe: That’s fantastic. Well, I mean, you know, if you tell someone something three times, they’re more likely to remember it. And if you tell someone something three times, they’re more likely to remember it. And if you tell someone something three times, they’re more likely to remember it. So there’s absolutely nothing wrong with really driving the point home. Charles, it’s an extremely, extremely valid point you raise. So thank you very much. And finally, Claire, finish us off. See us home. What’s your one golden rule,

Claire: I would say, know your audience, you know. So we’ve gone through talking about looking at the data, knowing what channels to target people through, depending on your industry. So it’s all going to come down to who is your target audience, what did they need, giving them that is going to drive more of that traffic to your site.

Joe: Claire, thank you very much. Excellent salient point. Hey, guys. This has been really fun. I really, really enjoyed chatting to all of you. I hope you’ve had a valuable experience coming on here and giving away some really expert advice. Thank you to everybody who’s watching this. And please do join us for our next Lead Forensics webinar. But yeah, thank you so much for joining us and we’ll see you again. Cheers, thank you.