Just as the flow of people is important for a physical store in the real world, the movement of people on the Internet is essential for any business to remain healthy and profitable!
The difference is that in the digital environment you can reach hundreds of thousands of people in just a few hours!
The most accurate and consistent way to direct people to your brand’s store or website on the Internet is through a perfect pair: paid and organic traffic!
At first glance, these elements may seem opposite, but you will see in this guide that there are no polarized maxims in Digital Marketing: all strategies aim to make you sell much more!
All my hands-on experience creating successful strategies with my team for Enjoy Minder is here — and you’ll learn:
- What is paid traffic;
- What is organic traffic;
- How to increase your traffic;
- And how to maximize your return on investment in Digital Marketing!
After all, what is traffic?
Many people like to talk about traffic by comparing it to highways in traffic: back and forth lanes on which people travel to get somewhere.
I prefer you to think about traffic in a different way!
Imagine that the Internet is a huge square, infinite in size, containing absolutely every type of store that anyone could need.
People aren’t just going from one point to another and they don’t always know where they’re going!
They simply walk around the square looking for:
- Answers to questions;
- Means of satisfying desires;
- Or ways to kill boredom when they have nothing else to do.
More than 5 billion people from all over the world walk back and forth in this infinite square!
This means that more than 65% of the world’s population spends most of the day looking for something to do in this virtual scenario full of variety, rather than looking for recreation in the real world!
With so many people looking for an answer (or an idea, a service or a product) that your business can offer — and with so many undecided people waiting for you to suggest what they should do — it’s only natural that you need to create an effective way to direct their attention to your space!
This is where the traffic management methodology comes into play in Digital Marketing — a way to:
- Attract people who are interested in what you have to offer (or who have the potential to be interested in your offerings);
- Capture those who seem most open to becoming a paying customer of your services or products;
- And convert those people into loyal fans (and frequent buyers)!
With so many people on the Internet, there’s no point in trying to get just anyone’s attention.
What’s the point of attracting the attention of a lower-middle-class person living in Russia when your product is a luxury gastronomic experience in a restaurant in Rio de Janeiro?
This person may be interested in what you have to offer, but that doesn’t mean they’re qualified to buy from you — they’ll just be window shopping!
To separate the wheat from the chaff among these billions of visitors wandering around the virtual world, traffic management in Digital Marketing plays the role of attracting those who can actually become customers in the end.
Attracted visitors with the highest chance of becoming potential customers are called leads.
That’s why qualified leads to be converted into customers make up the most critical metric for the success of your advertising campaign or Internet authority: your conversion rate !
What is paid traffic?
Paid traffic can be obtained by using third-party channels to promote your brand’s content while you pay for them.
It’s the famous Paid Media in Digital Marketing — and that’s why we call the traffic that comes from them “paid traffic”.
In the example from the previous section, it would be like putting up a giant sign in another company’s space on the Internet square to draw attention to your business!
Some examples of these channels are:
- Google Ads;
- Instagram Ads;
- Meta Ads (formerly Facebook Ads);
- LinkedIn Ads;
- Twitter Ads;
- Websites and blogs (native advertising, banners or advertorials).
In them, there is the possibility of segmenting your target audience that will receive the content based on demographic and social data (information such as the location, gender or age of your audience, for example).
It’s the fastest way to get results because you appear exactly in the most popular places where your ideal client already travels!
How to start a paid traffic strategy?
Paid traffic is a powerful ally to strengthen your sales strategy on the Internet because it focuses on the exact audience that is already looking for the solutions that your company offers!
This is why a crucial factor for the success of a paid traffic strategy is the proper segmentation of your ideal audience into ad groups.
Segmentation is the separation of specific groups — with similar behaviors, interests, brand awareness, and demographics — within your general target audience.
Through ad groups (which will only be displayed to the segmented groups that you deem relevant) you can take:
- Specific products;
- Special service conditions;
- And even exclusive promotions or discounts!
Segmentation helps you make the most of your investment in Digital Marketing campaigns and is essential for monitoring the results of your strategies in detail — invaluable information that can be reused in future campaigns!
All of this is done with a view to reducing your cost per conversion and increasing your ROAS (your Return on Advertising Investment, something I will explain in more detail shortly).
Is there anything better than making more profit while paying less?
Identifying segmentations
The first step to creating successful paid traffic strategies is to identify segmentations!
To separate your ideal audience into groups with similar interests, behaviors, and purchasing potential, you should start by identifying the keywords your leads use to find the answers or solutions your company offers.
Once you have listed some keywords (which can be just specific terms like “dogs” or short phrases like “Brazilian dog breeds”, what we call “long tail”) you will need to use a Digital Marketing tool to compare the search volume for these words.
Search volume (the number of times keywords are searched for on the Internet) can serve as a clue as to the market potential that your Paid Media could capture!
Some questions can help you identify the best keywords for your strategy, such as:
- What are the most competitive products or services in my portfolio?
- Which ones offer the best payment methods to customers?
- Which ones are exclusive or offer special conditions?
- And which ones give the best profit margin for my business?
The first three questions help you identify the products that have the greatest potential to capture customers’ attention among other ads.
A product with a good profit margin helps to improve the cost and return ratio of your advertising campaigns.
This return is especially important at the beginning of your Digital Marketing strategy with paid traffic!
Just remember that when any company is entering the world of paid traffic, what they have are estimates of return.
Because everything happens so quickly and dynamically, it is important to put one strategy into practice at a time to achieve greater precision in the next stages of your paid traffic campaign!
Once you get your hands on this data, don’t delay in applying the necessary corrections and improvements, okay?
Structuring your ad
When it comes to paid traffic, simply displaying a product is not enough: it must offer advantages over its competitors!
On a channel like Google Shopping, for example, comparing different e-commerce sites is crucial. The customer sees several options (side by side) for purchasing the same product and will certainly be attracted by the lowest price!
Even with Google Ads, search shows potential customers a variety of similar ads and organic results — and most of these potential leads will just click on the links that catch their eye.
For your ad to be successful, it is essential to offer special and explicit conditions for:
- Prices;
- Payments;
- Or deliveries.
Social media ads, on the other hand, have more space to talk about the features of a product, allowing for more elaborate and descriptive content — a strategy that usually offers better results when it comes to direct conversions!
It is also crucial to have well-produced photos and videos, as this will be the first contact the customer will have with your offer!
How to maximize ROAS
Return on Advertising Spend is represented by the acronym ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend) and this metric is a great indicator of the health of your ads!
Through ROAS you can have a clear idea of how much you are profiting from Paid Media in relation to how much you are spending to broadcast it.
Almost always (but not in all cases) the higher the ROAS, the more money your ads will be bringing into your business!
Some ways to increase this number include:
- Run campaigns on the platforms where your target audience spends most of their time;
- Pay attention to the relevance and content of your ads (title, description, Call to Action, images and videos);
- Perform A/B testing to choose the best versions of your offers;
- And monitor your campaigns periodically to avoid unnecessary expenses, fix errors before they become problems and optimize the campaigns with the lowest (or highest) performance.
Remember to interpret ROAS in context with your current strategy, as there is no general average return for all companies, types of campaigns, platforms, or specific types of media!
The more relevant and persuasive your CTA (Call to Action) is , the more likely you are to get people to click on your offers — whether paid or organic!
What is organic traffic?
Organic traffic is obtained through your own channels, created to share content and encourage spontaneous (and free) interactions between your target audience and your company!
Examples of owned channels include:
- Your website;
- A blog on your website;
- Or your social media profiles.
In them, interactions can be defined as:
- Access to your pages;
- The number of likes on your content;
- The number of shares of your posts;
- Your viewing numbers;
- And your conversions (when someone clicks on an offer or decides to register as a lead instead of just a visitor).
Unlike paid traffic, the results of organic traffic happen in the long term, but they are much more lasting!
An organic traffic source planned with Digital Marketing can bring new visitors and leads for life — maybe forever!
How to start an organic traffic strategy?
Strategies aimed at obtaining organic traffic are at the heart of success stories in Digital Marketing because they are great choices for the medium and long term!
Actions such as producing relevant content for your audience do much more than attract traffic to your website or online store — they also:
- Generate value;
- Establish trust;
- And increase your brand authority!
This is an effective way to show that your company knows what it is talking about, as well as creating a more open relationship with your audience.
But just publishing content is not enough!
There needs to be a lot of planning to ensure that the material is original and of quality in an effective strategy — truly capable of attracting organic traffic that converts into sales!
Start by understanding what type of content your audience consumes and how that material reaches them.
Then, build your planning on top of that!
Identifying the main product lines
To plan a content strategy and attract organic traffic to your website, first identify what the most important uses of your main product lines are!
Groupings can be made based on:
- The uses of the products;
- Their characteristics;
- And your audience segmentations.
To give you an example, imagine that your online store sells wines. Some of your product lines would then be:
- Red wines;
- White wines;
- Wines to accompany red meats;
- Wines to accompany poultry;
- Imported wines;
- Rare wines.
The first two categories (red and white wines) refer to the characteristics of the product.
The next two (wines to accompany meat and poultry) are related to the uses of the product.
The last two categories (imported wines and rare wines) are product lines for specific audiences: only for those who consume exclusive or collectible wines!
Choosing the best keywords
The next step is to choose the best keywords to work on in the content of each group.
You can use several tools in this process, including:
- Semrush , to identify the search volume for keywords;
- Google Trends, which helps you find trends and search patterns;
- RD Station, which has a lead tracking function (monitoring potential consumers), something extremely important in audience segmentation.
The goal here is to create a solid foundation of content from low-competition keywords with lots of internal links, which will help accelerate growth and can serve as a support when you start working on more competitive keywords.
A good tactic is to create about 70% of the content around low competition keywords — the long tails!
The remaining 30% of the content is created around the most competitive keywords, which you will gradually increase the proportion of use in the following months.
There’s no mystery!
Tips to increase organic traffic
You can (and should) take advantage of four main elements to increase your organic traffic through Digital Marketing:
- The application of SEO, which is another acronym in English for “Search Engine Optimization”, aims to improve the position of your page in search results through keywords and other content improvement techniques;
- Building backlinks, which are links from one piece of content to another — inside or outside your website (and even better when other companies and people direct links from their websites to yours);
- Content Marketing techniques, which is the methodology that applies Marketing directly to the body of the content to make it irresistible and easy to find on the Internet;
- And the best practices of social networks, in which you need to choose the best platforms to create content and invest your business resources to reap the best results!
The balance between paid and organic traffic
If organic traffic really is this gold mine that I’m presenting to you, then what is paid traffic for?
I imagine that this question has popped into your head at some point in this text — and the answer is simple!
Both organic and paid traffic have their own role in a balanced (and successful) Digital Marketing strategy:
- Organic traffic brings a huge and continuous volume of people to your page, but it takes months or years to gain traction, and requires constant work to create and publish relevant content;
- When you use Paid Media to generate paid traffic, you exchange money for immediate advertising, shown exclusively to the audience that is most important to you , accelerating your number of clicks and boosting the popularity of your brand.
These types of traffic are not antagonistic and both need to be included in your Internet Marketing planning!
While you produce and accumulate valuable content on your website or blog, you can inject specific values to promote them to people with profiles similar to those who follow your company on social media, but who do not yet know your brand!
It is possible to survive on organic traffic alone, but as I said, it can take some time to gain enough volume to convert visitors into buyers.
You can also live without spending a dime on paid traffic, but you will be dependent on spontaneous searches from your potential customers, on appearing in the first organic results through SEO and you will run the risk of search engine algorithms changing — leaving you high and dry!
The ideal is:
- Use organic traffic to bring in new audiences “spontaneously” (and for your audience to always have new content to consume, which increases your brand’s authority);
- And distribute your new products, services or popular content through paid traffic (with the aim not only of selling, but of collecting information about potential ideal audiences that are still outside your organic reach).
With this data, you will be able to create increasingly optimized content to organically attract the audience that until now you have only reached through paid traffic!
Then, just plan, create new strategies and repeat this pattern to reach increasingly larger audiences — and those more willing to buy what your company offers!
Useful tools for traffic management
You will need to monitor the flow of people in and out of your website to know how they behave and what they are looking for.
For this you can use:
- Google Analytics, to track the behavior of visitors on your website;
- Google Search Console, to analyze your company’s positioning in Google search results;
- Semrush, to research keywords and search volumes for them;
- Google Trends, also to identify keywords and trends in Google searches;
- RD Station, to automate Digital Marketing campaigns and analyze detailed results from them;
- And HubSpot, which also offers several automation options with complete control and data on audience behavior!
1783% more sales for UNiBag
A great success story for you to study is the Digital Marketing restructuring project of UNiBag — one of the most traditional wine and sparkling wine producers operating in Brazil!
Despite the company’s success with retail sales, the brand’s e-commerce was not bringing good results.
To solve this problem, my multidisciplinary team here at Enjoy minder and I developed paid traffic strategies to be implemented:
- In Google Ads;
- Through Instagram Ads;
- And also in Meta Ads.
Using these Digital Marketing tools, we can recognize and segment different audiences based on their purchasing potential:
- With Google Ads, we were able to focus, guide and recognize people who have already purchased, visited the website or interacted with the company’s profile on social networks ;
- Then we use the artificial intelligence features of Instagram and Meta Ads (formerly Facebook Ads) to find people with a similar profile to the quality group that we funneled through Google Ads!
The result was obvious in the exorbitant increase in sales in the brand’s online store!
To further strengthen this strategy, my team and I created blog content on the main topics of common interest between the company and the public, including:
- The types of grapes most used in wine production;
- How to pair wine flavors with different types of dishes;
- And other curiosities from the super exclusive universe of oenology (the study of wines)!
This has made UNiBag become its own content channel, rather than just a producer or retailer!
As you know, people try to find out about the type of purchase they intend to make online.
By becoming a source of information (in addition to being a store), UNiBag had the opportunity to dominate the market!
If someone were to search the Internet for answers about types of wine or other questions specific to this universe, they would find the answers (and the products) in one place: on the UNiBag website!
See more details about this extremely successful case in the banner below:
Companies of all sizes have already understood that offering relevant content is the main way to:
- Generate value;
- Create new opportunities;
- And sell more!
Some brands take this so seriously that they often buy the channels where their target audience already searches for information!
An example of this is Magazine Luiza, which bought CanalTech, In Loco and Hubsales — a smart and fantastic move!
Returning to UNiBag, my Enjoy Minder team and I also distribute quality content through E-mail Marketing and the brand’s social networks.
The company’s scenario has changed a lot because of this project : after meticulous work based on good SEO keyword practices, we made it much easier to find the UNiBag store on the Internet!
This was essential to getting a good result — especially since 67% of people searching on Google only click on the first five results on the page!
Before developing this strategy, only 6 of the company’s keywords were among the top three results on Google — but all of them were associated with UNiBag itself (i.e., they were not attributed to a public need).
On the other hand, until June 2020, we had 24.7 thousand keywords, with 1,845 keywords in the first three positions:
Companies of all sizes have already understood that offering relevant content is the main way to:
- Generate value;
- Create new opportunities;
- And sell more !
Some brands take this so seriously that they often buy the channels where their target audience already searches for information!
An example of this is Magazine Luiza, which bought CanalTech, In Loco and Hubsales — a smart and fantastic move!
Returning to UNiBag, my Enjoy minder team and I also distribute quality content through E-mail Marketing and the brand’s social networks.
The company’s scenario has changed a lot because of this project : after meticulous work based on good SEO keyword practices, we made it much easier to find the UNiBag store on the Internet!
This was essential to getting a good result — especially since 67% of people searching on Google only click on the first five results on the page!
Before developing this strategy, only 6 of the company’s keywords were among the top three results on Google — but all of them were associated with UNiBag itself (i.e., they were not attributed to a public need).
The path to digital success!
In short, it is extremely important to complement strategies focused on paid traffic together with organic traffic because there is no polarity: one source contributes to the other!
What makes the difference is the quality of your Digital Marketing strategy!
In the case of the project with UNiBag, I ensured that ads only appeared to people with huge purchasing potential — avoiding wasting resources on unqualified audiences to increase conversion rates into sales!
Because of this, the goals projected for two years were achieved in 6 months, increasing:
- 58600% in audience;
- 20% in store conversion rate ;
- And 1783% in sales!
These numbers show how a Digital Marketing plan is essential for a business like yours — especially when it comes to organic traffic and the complementary use of Paid Media to make it last a lifetime!
The integration of different channels and strategies is one of the biggest factors for the success of any project and there are no exceptions.
You can do the same thing by following what you learned in this text — or better yet: by partnering directly with me and Enjoy Minder!
Just fill out the form and secure your Digital Marketing Diagnosis + Consulting. It’s free and personalized!
The path to organic internet traffic success is paved — it’s up to you to decide whether you’ll follow it!
Are you going on foot or would you prefer a ride?
