How Social Media and Interactive Marketing Drives Website Traffic

interactive marketing

Each decade seems to bring with it new ways to connect with customers. Interactive marketing has never been so…interactive.

Needless to say, taking an interactive approach to marketing is about more than superficially interacting with customers. Making marketing campaigns more interactive is ultimately about increasing sales by leveraging your online presence.

In other words, it’s all about increasing traffic to your company’s website and reducing your bounce rate.

But how exactly does interactive marketing drive site traffic for businesses? And Is it really necessary? If you stick around long enough, we’ll figure things out together.

An Abundance of User Reviews

Social media practically epitomizes interactive marketing. A business’s social media profile allows customers to directly interact with that business.

Well, not exactly directly, but you get the point.

One way in which customers communicate with companies is by way of “unofficial” reviews. Customers can shower companies with praise at any given moment by way of Facebook or Twitter.

Any company that doesn’t use those positive reviews to their advantage is making a big mistake. Positive reviews make businesses look more trustworthy; people are much more likely to use a service if their friends or family rave about it.

For this reason, companies should jump at the opportunity to share or retweet the positive things people have said about them.

Social Sharing

Social sharing has become a huge deal. If you can get a single video or piece of content to go viral, you might just be able to put yourself on the map.

Of course, actively trying to make your content go viral isn’t the best strategy. That doesn’t mean, however, that you shouldn’t encourage users to share your content.

Because, you know, letting users do the work for you is seldom a bad thing.

Assuming that your content is interesting and shareable, you should have no problems encouraging just a few people to share your content. Just make sure that you include some buttons which allow users to share content on your site’s pages.

Targeting Influencers

Depending on which industry you work in, influence marketing can become a huge part of your interactive marketing campaign. Perhaps this is because influencers can breathe life into your brand in front of millions of people.

Because influencers usually have huge followings, they can easily drive traffic to your sites. Influencers have dedicated followers who trust them, and if influencers trust you, their followers are arguably more likely to do so as well.

Just remember that influencer marketing shouldn’t be treated like other types of marketing. Influencers have their own brand, which is what you should be trying to capitalize off of. There is no need to treat influencer marketing too commercially.

That is to say, you should trust the influencer to use his or her passion to your advantage. If you can’t do that, maybe influencer marketing isn’t for you.

Addressing Customer Concerns

You remember when we said that you should make use of those positive customer reviews? Well, as it turns out, you should make use of the negative ones as well.

Hear us out here. No one likes it when a customer leaves a negative review on Yelp or Facebook. Many businesses are proud of the work they do, and hearing those negative comments is not what they live for.

Still, directly addressing customer concerns is an incredibly important element of interactive marketing. Companies literally get chances to win over dissatisfied customers and find out how to improve their service in the future.

Unfortunately, though, dealing with negative reviews is difficult. It’s hard not to get defensive about your products or services, and that’s not a judgment on you or anyone else. It’s completely normal.

Despite that fact, you should still work on addressing negative reviews. It would be nearly impossible for you not to benefit from learning this skill.

Pushing Visual Content

Visual is where it’s at, which is pretty evident to almost anyone who uses social media. Timelines and feeds are filled to the brim with videos and amusing images.

And there’s no reason that some of those videos and images shouldn’t be yours. Social media just makes it too darn easy to share visual content with your followers.

Don’t, however, make the mistake of sharing generic content with your followers. They want to see something authentic. This means that pictures of your staff that put your company culture on display, for instance, are fair game.

If you really want to interact with customers, you can go ahead and live stream. You may not actually be face-to-face with your followers while you stream, but a live stream is close enough for some people.

Social Media and SEO

You might be tired of hearing about search engine optimization, and we don’t know that we can blame you there.

But, as much as it pains our hearts, we’re going to talk about search engine optimization.

The fact of the matter is that SEO is a big part of successful marketing campaigns today. No, it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get to the first SERP, but you can’t just do away with it as a strategy.

Your social media pages are a huge part of that strategy. Each social media page that you maintain is a credit to your site’s ranking. In other words, those pages are helping drive traffic to your site.

Social media pages also help drive traffic to your site in another big way. You no doubt post content from your site on your pages. Some followers actually follow the links back to your site.

That said, make sure that your landing page is tight. You don’t, after all, want too many visitors to bounce after following those links.

Use Interactive Marketing to Drive Site Traffic

There is no sure way to site traffic. Even all of the best tips and tricks, you might struggle to get your site the attention you think it deserves.

But, hey, that’s just business. No need to get discouraged.

Just keep preserving. It takes time to get your site noticed, but once you get it on the map, it should be smooth sailing from there.

Mostly.

In any case, you should know that you’re not alone here. We’re behind you every step of the way and ready to provide you with the SEO tools you need. Just reach out to us and we’ll be there.