Most marketers focus on driving more visitors to their websites in an effort to build awareness for their products and services. But is this the best policy? Overall, corporate websites are boring and usually don't do a good job of converting visitors into sales-ready leads.
When does it make sense NOT to drive them to your main website, but direct them elsewhere? The next time you create an email marketing campaign or invest in online advertising, think about new places you could send people. Here are a few examples:
Your Blog
If you have a company blog (which you should), why not direct people to interesting blog articles that demonstrate your knowledge and expertise? Better yet, direct people to specific articles based on the person's industry, challenges, or situation. For example, why not create 5 different versions of your email newsletter for 5 different types of prospects. Then, you can insert links to the most relevant blog articles for each group's custom newsletter.
At BuzzBuilder, we have 4 different types of communications we send based on whether the person is a Sales Manager, Marketing Manager, Small Business Owner, or Sales Rep. Whenever prospects and clients get an email from us, their message only includes links and articles that are most relevant to them.
Articles You've Published
Publishing articles and white papers, otherwise known as Article Marketing, is a great way to build your credibility and find new prospects. Regardless of your industry, you have certain skills and knowledge you can share with your prospects. Once you're ready to publish a new article, tap into several of the Article Directories available. We recommend one like iSnare, which will submit your article to over 1000 other websites for only $2.
Once you've published a new article, send your clients and prospects an email message with a link to it. You can also announce the new article on your website, and provide a link to where the article is published on another site.
Partner Websites
Partnering with other companies is a great way to double your marketing efforts. Each of you agrees to link to each others' website and promote each others' businesses. For example, each of you could ask the other company to participate in monthly newsletters by submitting content and stories. You can also link to partner companies from several of your blogs and published articles. If you're writing about a topic where a partner has related content, provide a link to their blog.
YouTube and Other Social Media
We love linking to YouTube. There are other sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn that you can link to. Here's how we use YouTube to drive more traffic to our site: First, we create an interesting YouTube video (of course). However, be sure that you mention your website address at the beginning AND the end of the video. Next we promote the video on our website and in all email communications by providing a link to it. As the video gets more visitors and its popularity increases, it will begin to draw in more traffic through organic searches. Before you know it, you'll have several new visitors to your website you found you on YouTube.
I think of this as a "Push/Pull" Strategy. I'm pushing a small amount of traffic to my YouTube video, and eventually pulling in a much larger amount of traffic.
