Table of Contents
How can businesses increase referral traffic and measure its success?
You can try several strategies to increase your referral traffic; knowing the right choice for you will require some experimentation. Here are some options to consider:
- Social Media Marketing: Use platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook to share content with your target audience. You’ll need to engage them and, in many cases, post multiple times per week. Research your target audience and determine which platforms they’re most likely to be active on.
- Link-Building: Create content that other websites would want to link to. This, in turn, would generate site visits.Link-building should be done organically if you want to naturally attract more referral traffic.
- Influencer Marketing: Work with people in your industry for product/service promotion through paid sponsorships. This approach utilizes the influencer’s audience and potentially affects brand awareness. You could also set up an affiliate program and pay the influencer a commission.
- Customer Engagement: Incentivize customers to refer people they know.
- Guest Posting: Contribute articles on authoritative websites in your niche.
- Press Releases: Distribute news within your industry; you can with with PR agencies for this or do it on your own. The news has to be worth covering – one thing you could try is creating an in-depth industry report.
Besides trying different referral tactics, you need to set up the right analytics. If you’re using a social media platform, use these platforms’ tools or buy a social media analytics tool. Setting up Google Analytics is also important for measuring how many people visit your website (and where from). While Hocoos offers Google Analytics integration, be sure your chosen website builder has that feature.
What are the challenges and best practices associated with optimizing referral traffic?
You need to understand your data to make the most of your referral traffic program. A comprehensive understanding of the inherent challenges and recommended practices can contribute to a more successful implementation.
Challenges:
- Self-referrals have the potential to influence the accuracy of your data, but the extent of that influence may differ.
- Attracting organic takes time, and as a result, you need to be patient.
Practices:
- Put the strongest possible data-tracking metrics in place; these must be able to filter self-referrals. Spending the time to put these systems together in your early tracking phases is vital.
- You must build relationships in your industry and be proactive. Going to industry events and talking to others is important, and you should also identify the biggest websites and seek to guest blog on them. Even if your social media following is small, you should still engage with your community and build that habit now.
- Collaborate with ambassadors and influencers.
- Set up UTM codes and test to ensure that these are working as they should. UTM codes are important for getting more detailed information that you can then work with. Once you have this data, look at your main channels and think about where you should then optimize your strategy.
Conclusion
Understanding website referral traffic is vital if you want to grow a sustainable long-term brand. While SEO is important, you should also think about alternative traffic channels. Social media marketing can work when you choose platforms aligned with your audience, for example.
You also need to think about link-building, guest blogging, and influencer marketing. Not all of these will work for you, but you should experiment to see what sticks. Set up your analytics software in advance, too, so you can start tracking data as soon as possible.
Once you have this data, you should then iterate. Identify areas of strength and consider potential adjustments for areas with room for development.
