 I've been saying for years that you can build a website, you can produce a podcast, but if you don't have the listeners or the viewers, the visitors, then what's the point? Welcome to the We Are Slam Show where you'll learn marketing agency insights, best practices and ideas to help your business grow. Today we're going to talk about the three types of traffic and how to use them to drive results for your business. Now, of course, you hear a lot about content. You hear a lot about social media, a lot about digital marketing, but what is it that holds all these things together? It's traffic. I've been saying for years that you can build a website, you can produce a podcast, but if you don't have the listeners or the viewers, the visitors, then what's the point? There's billions of pieces of content uploaded to the web daily. The internet is already full and unlike in the movies, if you build it, they will come. This doesn't happen in the world of digital and internet marketing. You can spend a lot of time building something only to discover that the traffic, the interest, the eyeballs just aren't there. It's a failed effort. In this show, I want to talk about the three types of traffic because at the end of the day, it's really about when you build something to get the people there to see it. Now, we talk all the time about understanding your customers. I always say your customers. You don't need to know my customers. You don't need to know your competitor's customers. You need to understand your customers because once you truly understand your customers, you're going to have this foundational knowledge of not only where they are, but at what point in the buyer's journey they are as well. This is critical information because this information is going to allow, is going to give you what you need to go out there and draw them into your offer. If you don't know where they are, then you don't know where to start when it comes to traffic. Today's show is all about traffic, the three types of traffic. The first is traffic that you buy. The second is traffic that you control. The third is traffic that you own. I'm going to go into a little bit of detail for each of these and show you how you can get the best bang for your buck and where to invest your time, energy, and money. The first and most obvious type of traffic is traffic that you buy. As a marketing director, I'm sure that you are familiar with this idea of buying traffic, buying media. What this means is that you have an offer and that you want to get eyeballs on that offer. Disclaimer here, generally, if your offer is not working, it's not the eyeball problem. A lot of times if an offer is just not producing at the level that you expect it to produce at, then it's like, well, I just need to get more eyeballs on this offer. Generally not the case. If your offer is not producing, then there's a problem with your offer, not with the amount of people who are seeing it. That's a side note. But when we talk about traffic that you buy, it's about going out, purchasing ads, purchasing traffic, and doing this with dollars, and then directing that traffic back to your offer. One of the questions I get asked a lot is where are some of the best places to buy traffic? Where are some of the best places to place my ads? This all comes back to who is your customer and where are they on the internet or offline? Where are they? If you know where they are, then you know where to find them. If you don't know where they are, then I would venture to say that you don't actually know your customer and so you need to take a step back before you spend any money in advertising. You need to take a step back and get to know your customer. When I say get to know your customer, I don't just mean get to know their psychographics or their pain points, these types of things. What I mean is where are they and where can you find them? Get to know where they are and where you can find them. This will allow you to make intelligent decisions when it comes to placing media, when it comes to buying advertising. If you understand where your customers are and you have an offer that you know captivates and attracts those types of people into your funnel, then at that point you can put money into buying traffic because you know where they are and you know you have an offer that works. Buy that traffic, double down on that traffic, get the analytics, make sure that you're able to track it from point A to point B and understand when I spend $1, I'm going to earn $1.50 or when I spend $5, I'm going to earn $10. If that's the case, then you can spend all day. If you don't know the answers to these questions, then you need to begin, as you buy traffic, to begin tracking, to begin taking notes, to begin to you know create trends and baselines and figure out you know where is my break-even point and how much do I need to spend to make you know a profit, how much do I need to spend to make two times that spend, whatever the case may be. These are the questions that you need to be able to answer. Now the disadvantage to buying traffic is that you're going to have to continue to buy traffic in order to continue to produce the results that you're used to producing. But you can't buy traffic forever. I guess maybe you can buy traffic forever, especially if it's profitable, but ideally as you build out a more sustainable, long-term, repeatable process, you're able to do so without always needing to buy traffic. In fact, wouldn't it be nice to have some traffic you know kind of in a bag back here that you can kind of just pull out from time to time and it's a lot less than you know going to the market and buying traffic. Well that's what we call traffic that you control and you know the last few years this traffic that you control really has come about in the way of social media. Whether it's Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, these are places where you have a following and that following is a you know that's traffic that's those are people that are ideally are your target customers or customers and you're able to you know do a post on Facebook and grab their attention, right? This is the ideal. Now a lot of you spend a lot of time money and energy into building your social media following so that you know you could put a post out there and you could you know bring people into your offer. But here's the thing, what have we seen? All that time energy and money that went into building that Facebook following into building you know these audiences? What has happened? You can no longer access them for free. The organic reach has deteriorated and matter of fact you know we could post a post on Facebook and if we're not putting some you know a little bit of money behind it there aren't very many people that are going to see it and the the fact is you know what that's that's Facebook's decision not ours regardless of how much time money and energy we put into that network at the end of the day the network is owned by Facebook the traffic is owned by Facebook you know every every profile every person that follows you that's not your traffic and you can't just expect to put a post up and have those people see it because now Facebook is like if you want these people to see it because you know quote unquote you know there's so much noise here there's so much going on that we really have to pay attention to what we're showing you know our users and you know we just don't think that your content as a business is relevant to their day to day lives. At that point it doesn't matter how much you put into it Facebook's like no however if you want to you can pay to show your ad your offer your post to your fans okay and we've had this terminology of my fans our fans your fans for many years now but just keep in mind that it's Facebook's fans these are Facebook users and I don't care if you have 10,000 or 10 million at this point in time it's going to cost you money to access those fans to access those followers and what that means is that you know this might have been traffic that you controlled at one point but now it's traffic that you're going to have to buy again. Now Twitter following same thing LinkedIn same thing you know these are different places where traditionally these are different places where you know previously this was traffic that you controlled it's traffic that you had access to now it's traffic that you have to buy so the idea here with traffic that you control is that you don't own it and that in at any point regardless of how much time money and energy you've put into developing that audience at any point that traffic because you don't own it can be taken away from you it can you know they can shut down your facebook page they can you know shut down your youtube channel whatever the case is you don't own this traffic and so the third type of traffic which i've alluded to the best kind of traffic is traffic that you own. Now the internet marketing gurus since the beginning of the internet have been saying that you have to develop a list you have to build a list okay and a lot of times when we hear this word list we're like email lists like we have to collect emails like this is so 1999 the point is though this is some of that timeless wisdom that has continued and carried on throughout the years the list is what matters you know we kind of got sidetracked with social media in these things and i'm not saying that social media isn't effective and it's not important as a matter of fact it is it's something i believe very very strongly about in a positive way but when it comes to building a list your best bet is to build your own list to have traffic that you own i.e collecting email addresses okay how do you do this well obviously you have to have a way to capture email addresses this is internet marketing 101 your offer you ask for the email you get the email you store the email you communicate with the email you segment the email addresses into people that are buyers and people that are lookers right people that are interested in your offer people that meet a certain psychographic demographic geographic area you begin to build your list and to segment it and then test it here's an offer here how does this list respond to this offer here's an offer here how can i nurture these people this is how you build grow and nurture a list and this is important because the traffic that you own is traffic that you can continue to come back to year after year it's traffic that will always be there i'm assuming that these email addresses that this is these are customers they represent customers that are your customers okay so i'm not just saying go out to you know a data clearing house something like that and buy you know 100 thousand emails first of all that's pointless and that's going to lead to email spam okay there's lots of laws that you when we're thinking about you know collecting email addresses and communicating with email addresses that are in place so that you don't just go out there and buy 100,000 emails and just start spamming them as a matter of fact even if i was your customer and you were spamming me you'd probably turn me off like if i was going to be your customer at some point in the future you would turn me off you would lose the opportunity to win my business so don't buy a list build a list the key here is to build the list right if you build the list this is traffic that you own traffic that you know you can send an email to and you're going to get a positive response and that really is the end game okay email marketing is alive and well if you are communicating with people that number one want to be communicated with and you're communicating things that are valuable and relevant to them okay it's like any other type of content email marketing is a channel email is a channel that if you're consistent relevant and valuable then guess what you're going to see good results in the last few years we've seen as an industry a decrease in open rates in click-through rates why is this it's because the content the email is not relevant and one thing i love about HubSpotCRM is if somebody has an open your email i think after 10 or 12 tries then they take that person off the list because number one it's going to decrease your chances at delivering that email anyway i love that they do that because what happens is if you have too many people that are not opening not responding not clicking through on your emails then then what happens is you know you get the score that you know perhaps your email is spam and so the more people that you send an email to and no one opens it then you're kind of creating the spam potentially spam snowball where you know you're starting to get to the inboxes anymore you might you know if you're in gmail you might get to that promotions box but eventually you're just going to fall off and end up in trash and i've seen this happen time and time again because people aren't putting the care into what they're sending to their list i mean part of having traffic that you own is that you care for it it's something that you put thought into you know you're not just going to send them everything under the sun at one point in email marketing land you know we would just send a newsletter and we'd send it to everybody on the list and i and very quickly i figured out that you can't just send your newsletter to everyone on the list obviously you send it to subscribers to the people that have actually opted in but then you know for the people that haven't maybe even your customers maybe they don't want to see the newsletter and so you kind of figure out like how are they responding to your emails but then also is this content in this specific email does it fit their needs does it fit their experiences if it does then send it to them but if it doesn't leave them off the list this week but outside of email when we're talking about specifically email how can we use this list of traffic that we own well a great way to use a list and when i say list i mean a physical list of email addresses a great way to use a list is to put that list into google ads or facebook ads and create a custom audience okay so you take that list you throw it into facebook you create a custom audience and now you can target those people through advertising on facebook so you're kind of stacking you know traffic that you own or traffic that you buy you're giving this list of facebook so that they can go out and bring those people into your offer they might not be fans of your facebook page at this point but bring them in so that you can show them this and this is where really you get into this idea of familiarity where it's like okay how many times can we touch somebody in order that they will become our customer so maybe it's like okay let's show them some ads on facebook number one you have to have their email let's show them some ads on facebook they're going to see our ads they're going to see our post there's going to be a suggestion that you know if they're not aware of us maybe now they're becoming aware of us we've got you know we've got their email targeting in google ads if they do a search in google and it's relevant to one of our topic areas our focus areas then we're going to show that person an ad an ad because they're on our list and then it comes to okay well now they've clicked on the ad they come to the site now it's remarketing retargeting of this person and then at some point it's like okay if you have a sales team this person has you know seen these ads they've they've been on our site they've been reading you know they've read this blog and this blog and this blog maybe this is somebody that you as a sales person a representative of the company should reach out to this person on linkedin and i'm not by any means suggesting you know just friend them and say hey do business with me but you know reach out and then begin to build that relationship depending on what type of business you're in build that relationship with that person knowing that they're already aware of you right this is a beauty of a list that you own this is just you know we're just scratching the surface we're just getting the tip of the iceberg on what it is that you're able to do with traffic that you own the idea here is though is to build the list and then nurture it make sure that they become aware of you knowing that there's multiple touch points you know if if somebody's not aware of you it takes on average 70 plus times 70 plus touches for them to become aware of you if they're not aware of their problem yet then that's a whole other you know ballpark so three types of traffic number one traffic that you buy number two traffic you control and number three traffic that you own of course traffic that you own is what we're all going for it's building the list and nurturing it and continuing to provide value to those people so much so that every time you email that list every time you show an ad to somebody on that list they're going to respond in a positive way to drive the results that you are looking to drive as a marketing director thank you for tuning in if you enjoyed this show let me know in the comments if you're listening or watching on a podcast network be sure to subscribe rate and review i appreciate you for spending this time with me today and i will see you next week thanks for watching if you like what you saw subscribe and hit that bell you'll be the first to be notified when new content goes live after that you can watch more videos from slam agency we picked something we think you'll love