August has arrived and the first day of school is right around the corner. For kids all across the country, that means it’s time to bust out the backpacks, notebooks, and rulers. However, just because it’s back to school time for kids doesn’t mean you can’t school your business this season and take your company to the next level. So fire up your calculators, sharpen your pencils, and join us for our back to school series.
For today’s lesson, we’re going to take a look at some marketing math. There are tons of little changes you can start today that add up to big differences in web traffic and brand awareness. Whether it’s the number of times you blog in a month or the content for your social media posts, little tweaks in marketing can add up to big traffic changes. Let’s take a look at a few of them:
Blogging
The tried and true method of inbound marketing is blogging. By providing interesting and relevant content for your visitors, your business can attract a wide range of customers to your site. Interestingly, one number can make a radical change in the amount of visitors to your blog and site: the number of blog posts in a month. In April 2015, Hubspot pulled data from their huge customer base and looked in to how the number of blog posts a month could affect traffic.
The results were incredible. With some variation based on the size of the company, a monthly a blog post count of at least 11 per month saw between 2x and 3.5x the traffic of companies that were publishing just 0-1 blog posts a month. They also saw significant returns when it came to lead generation. A company who blogged more than 11 times a month saw between 1.7x and 2.5x the leads generated from various inbound sources. Now remember, this doesn’t mean that you can just plaster irrelevant content on your blog and suddenly you’ll see tons of new traffic. Content will always be king, but a higher frequency of great content can make a big difference in your traffic numbers.
Images
When it comes to advertising your products, the first impressions will come from your product images. So the small change you can make now that add up to big marketing payoffs is committing to brilliant images and designs.
Also, when I’m browsing online, the one thing that I really hate is when I click on a product thumbnail and the “enlarged” image is the exact same size as the thumbnail. So instead of causing this kind of strife for your customers, commit to high resolution product images.
Social Media
Social media is a great way to connect with your customers, raise band awareness, and it is something everyone and their brother is trying figure out. Everyone has the dream of one of their posts going viral, having hundreds of thousands of views, retweets, likes, and upvotes. Obviously, not every post will see that magnitude of popularity, but here is one little thing can boost the visibility of your social media posts: paying attention to the time.
That’s right, the time of day that you post for each social media site can make a difference when it comes to views, likes, and clicks for your posts. Based on results of studies like this by Buffer and great infographics like this, LinkedIn posts see click through rates during business hours, Twitter posts see a lot of retweets in the evening, and Facebook posts see a lot of interaction in the afternoon. Obviously, these guidelines will not hold true for everybody. But, something as simple as testing different times for posting can lead to big increases for social interactions and brand awareness and is definitely worth checking out.
Class Dismissed
That’s the first class of our back to school series. Let’s check our work. Taking the time to make a few changes can really add up when put together. Getting high resolution images set up, checking the time for social media posts, and upping your blog posts a month can make a big difference. Join us next week when we jump in to the next piece of our back to school series.