There are certain digital marketing tactics that are ideal for generating quick, website traffic growth in the short-term, and certain tactics that will allow you to achieve more sustained, long-term results. Depending on your goals, both short-term and long-term digital marketing tactics can play a valuable role in your larger digital strategy. Below we discuss the advantages of each, as well as how they can be beneficial in developing your overall marketing strategy.

Short-Term Traffic Growth

Paid Search Advertising is one of the quickest ways to expose new prospects to your website. Although it can be part of your long-term strategy, it is often used to generate immediate growth.

Paid search can be especially effective for a variety of reasons:

1. Different Markets & Devices: Because ads can be geo-targeted, you can quickly learn what offers perform best in which markets. You can also see how people interact with your site depending on what device they’re using, which allows you to better understand what information must be readily available on each.
2. Test Conversions: The large influx of relevant site visitors will allow you to test different calls-to-action, forms and various onsite conversion tactics. These experiments give you a better understanding of how to maximize lead conversions as your organic traffic grows.
3. It’s Trackable: For every dollar you spend in paid search, you should have clearly defined goals with which to measure your ROI. Having a solid understanding of your paid search ROI will allow you to more easily budget for it, should you ever need to return to it to grow your traffic.
4. Long-term Onsite Strategy: Paid search allows you to understand how to maximize your content marketing investment. Knowing which keywords, ads, and micro-content perform best on your site will give you better insight into where to focus your organic traffic growth.

Long-Term Traffic Growth

Long-term, sustained online traffic growth requires a heavy investment of time and resources in content marketing. Content marketing is the creation and distribution of new, engaging and educational onsite content on your website

Although it requires a larger investment, there is simply no substitute for good content marketing. Not only does it result in a better onsite experience for your visitors, but depending on your industry, the content you write will have serious shelf-life, which can bring in new traffic for years to come.

While many business owners love the idea of engaging content, they simply can’t afford to spend their precious time writing blogs & onsite offers. Similarly, most people are hesitant to hand over the reigns of content creation because no one knows their business quite like they do. Other business owners happily take on the task of content creation, but soon realize how quickly it can fall behind revenue-generating projects. The best solution is to partner with someone who understands the required commitment & can create a custom roadmap for how they will be able to fulfill your content needs in a consistent, timely way.

Different Goals; Different Measurements

Whether you are investing in long-term or short-term strategies, you must have onsite goals in place to measure the success of each. We regularly meet business owners who pay for online advertising or onsite content, yet they can’t identify exactly what it does for them. With the amount of sophisticated, cross-channel digital tracking that exists today, there’s no excuse for not measuring how your tactics compare for lead and sale generation.