One of the biggest challenges when you launch a new website or blog is to find the people who are interested in what you have created. Fortunately, digital marketing offers plenty of opportunities for connecting with the people who want what you have to offer them.
While it may seem overwhelming at first to grow a whole new audience from zero, there are a few simple steps you can take to get started.
Here are a few examples:
1 – Regularly post new content on your website
Consider setting up a blog schedule where you plan to publish at least one new blog post each week. Also make sure that the content on your website is kept up to date. This has a few major benefits: it ensures that your website visitors find accurate information on your website, it shows that you’re actively involved in creating relevant content (which enhances your credibility), it gives visitors a reason to keep coming back, it provides you with content to share on your social media profiles, and it gives you a better chance of being found organically via search engines.
Also read: How to Create Quality Content
2 – Use social media
Spend some time researching which social media platforms are most effective for your niche and where your target audience is most likely to be. Then set up accounts on those platforms, make sure that your profiles are complete and that they link back to your website, and set up a regular posting schedule. How frequently you post will vary from one platform to another, and will depend on factors such as how much time you have available and how quickly you are able to create content.
Tips:
- Consider working with social media influencers to grow your brand
- Use interactive posts such as polls, quizzes, and competitions to engage your audience
- Use relevant hashtags
- Make sure your content is visually appealing (especially for platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and YouTube)
- Invest some time in engaging with the audience you’re trying to reach. Follow other influencers and thought leaders in your field, for example, and like and comment on posts that are interesting to you. This will help you to build your brand online.
3 – Create email marketing campaigns
Make sure you include a lead capture form on your website, so that you can collect the names and email addresses of people who are interested in communicating with you and staying up to date with your new content.
This gives you the opportunity to send out weekly or monthly email newsletters, as well as to create targeted email campaigns that focus on sending more personalised content to your visitors. If you have a web shop, for example, you may want to send out reminders of abandoned carts, or emails about special offers on products your visitors have recently viewed. Do make sure, however, that you get permission to send these types of emails – you can do this by including a checkbox on the lead capture form, asking for permission to send newsletters and promotional emails.
When you send out these emails, you not only increase audience engagement and website traffic, but you can also grow your audience when the recipients forward the emails to their friends, family, and colleagues who may also be interested in the content.
You can easily set up email marketing campaigns using tools such as Mailchimp.
4 – Invest in search engine optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation refers to all the steps you take to make your website easier for search engines to find and to rank higher in the search results. The field of SEO is way too broad to cover in depth in this article, but here are a few key points:
- Identify keywords and phrases that your audience are likely to use when they search for what you are offering and use these (and their synonyms) in your content.
- Publish original content on your website.
- Create relevant internal links between the pages on your website. These links are useful for your website visitors as well as for the search engines.
- Ensure that your website is mobile friendly.
- Pay attention to your site speed. Websites that load faster are likely to rank higher than their slower competitors, and site speed is a huge factor in ensuring that visitors stay on your site.
- Earn backlinks to your website, for example by writing guest blog posts for other websites, posting on sites such as Quora and Reddit, and getting listed in reputable directories relevant to your niche.
These are only a few examples. If you’d like to learn more about how you can grow your audience with SEO, please feel free to contact us.
5 – Consider paid advertising
Paid advertising is a relatively quick way to attract new visitors to your website. There are many platforms that enable you to set up highly targeted advertising campaigns, which you can use to attract visitors in a certain geographic region, visitors of certain age groups, visitors with specific interests, visitors who have similar profiles to the people who have already visited your website (lookalike audiences), and much more.
Some examples of platforms you can try out include:
- Google Ads
- Bing Ads
- Facebook advertising
- LinkedIn advertising
- Pinterest advertising
- Twitter advertising
6 – Use your network
Share your website URL with your friends, family members, and anyone else you know who might be interested in what you have to offer.
Also consider using your personal social media profiles to share the links to some of your content.
And when you attend conferences or events, have some business cards ready with your website URL printed on them.
7 – Measure your efforts
When you’re working on growing your audience, it helps if you can see your progress. With free tools such as Google Analytics, you can track how many people visit your website, where they are coming from (social media, search engines, external links, emails, ads, and so on), which pages they visit, how much time they spend on your website, and much more.
By using the insights that you gain from your analytics data, you can refine your strategy and grow your audience more effectively.