How to drive traffic to your website through social media.

This question just came up again. There are a few steps you can take to make social media work to raise your position in the search engine results, build awareness of your products or service and expand your customer base just by using the many free popular channels that make up the social media world.

First, figure out which channels your ideal customer is most likely using. (Assuming you have already defined your ideal customer — if not, take the time to define who you want to reach.) Use the marketing tools each channel offers. Try Facebook ads, for instance, you can define your target very tightly, by zipcode, age, gender, household income and many other filters. You can also set your own budget for Pay Per Click ads (PPC). Then link the ad back to your website.

The ad above is a Facebook ad we ran earlier this year to reach landscape architects. It linked directly to a sales page which advertised our ability to help build their customer base through online marketing.

Blog. Always post content on your website first. Then review the post to pull out relevant information to tailor to the different audiences each channel provides. Send people back to your site by linking to the full article. Add photos or videos to get extra attention. Do all this frequently!

Taking on the job of keeping these communications frequent and fresh can be very time consuming. The best thing to do is hire an experienced web marketing group (like ours). Short of that, try Hootesuite or another tool that allows you manage your social media from one dashboard. If you can afford it get HubSpot — but you'll still have to generate content. It's really a big job, not as easy as it looks! Best of luck.