Small business owners often focus on one online marketing tactic in order to maximize return on investment (ROI). It’s a common concern on business owners’ minds, whether they’re just starting or already running a business. It’s also the same concern both B2B and B2C companies share across all industries. One online marketing tactic alone will never yield the highest ROI. There’s no silver bullet. So stop spending time and energy looking for something that doesn’t exist.
One Tactic Is Never Enough
Understanding why one tactic will never be enough for any business is important. Let’s take search engine optimization (SEO) as an example since that’s typically the tactic people think of when talking about online marketing. Could strategic SEO services alone ever deliver the highest return on investment?
SEO is a great traffic tactic. By optimizing a website to rank for relevant keywords, you’ll drive prospects to it. That’s great, but what’s next? It is possible that if you focused solely on SEO, you would have a lot of website traffic without any sales. That’s because you would miss out on website conversion tactics.
It’s a fact that traffic does not equal sales. Driving traffic to a website is only one-third of the equation. So SEO, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, social media, publicity, or referral partnerships will never be enough to drive traffic.
As we mentioned earlier, traffic is only 33% of the equation. Another third is website conversions; the remaining one-third is customer value. Here’s how to calculate the revenue generated from online marketing:
(Website Traffic) x (Website Conversion Rate) x (Customer Value) = Online Marketing Revenue
It will guide an online marketing plan, so memorize it. It is essential that you drive traffic to your website, convert it into sales, and continue to maximize the value of your customers over time to generate the highest ROI. You can only continuously improve your online marketing by tracking and analytics, which means you really need four tactics.
Despite this knowledge, you may still be tempted to search for one best traffic strategy. Let’s quickly address that mistake…
The Reason You Should Never Use Just One Traffic Tactic
One isn’t just the loneliest number; it’s also the riskiest. If you’re currently relying on just one source of website traffic, like SEO or advertising, then you’re at risk. Some businesses always go belly up whenever Google updates its algorithm because they didn’t diversify their traffic sources; all they had was SEO.
If you’re looking for the ONE best traffic source, you’re on the wrong track!
If your goal is to generate one sale per day (30 per month), one strategy would be to find one traffic source that can generate 30 sales per month or 30 different traffic sources that can each generate one sale. This diversified approach makes your business so much more stable. If one tactic fails, you have 29 others that can pick up the slack. I would choose the 30 traffic sources every time.
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