Bouvard Cruises in Mandurah started their journey down the Social Media marketing road late last year by firstly creating a Facebook business page closely followed by a blog called “Mandurah’s Dolphin Blog”, a YouTube Channel and a Twitter account. The strategy was to use the blog to record sightings using photos and videos then use their Facebook and Twitter pages to share the information and drive traffic to their website.

The Rewards

10 months later and they are now seeing the rewards. Over the 10 month period the Dolphin Blog has become the highest referring website for sending visitors to the Bouvard Cruises website, followed by Experience Perth then their Facebook page. They have seen a 72% increase in visitors to their site since last year and it’s still climbing!

But it gets better!

Using Google Analytics to monitor traffic to their website we’ve seen in the last 3 months their Facebook page has overtaken the Dolphin Blog as their highest referring website, it actually referred 3 times as much traffic as their second referring website. In fact their Facebook page sent more visitors to their website in the last month than the combined total of their next 8 referring sites! As far as traffic sources go only Google is higher than their Facebook page!

So what does this tell us?

A social media strategy used effectively drives traffic to your website.
A Facebook page is a powerful marketing tool. Combine it with a blog for more power.
If you don’t have a Facebook page or a blog or a social media strategy… you are missing out.
If you have a Facebook page and a blog keep using it.
Make more postings, monitor them daily and interact with your customers who make posts and replies.
Make it part of your daily office marketing routine to check your Facebook page first thing every morning and again last thing in the afternoon. Make at least 1-2 post a week and make sure respond to yours fans posts and questions.
Most importantly stick at it!

This all this proves that a social media campaign involving a clear strategy is a very powerful marketing tool that drives customers to your website. Just ask Rod!

I was just discussing with a friend the benefits of blogging and how it makes your website dynamic and more enticing to customers and search engines. Our talk reminded me of this post by Hubspot that I came across recently.

Many companies have useful content on their websites, but having good content is no longer enough.

The problem with many companies is not that they are incapable of entering the content mindset. It’s that they stop having this mindset once they launch their site.

Websites are static, but blogs are dynamic. All these companies need to do is turn their static content into dynamic content.

3 Reasons Why Your Website Content Should be Dynamic

1. It Keeps Your Visitors Interested

You want people to have a reason to come back to your website. If your website content is static, visitors can just browse your site once and they’re done. But if you’re putting out new content all the time, they have reason to come back. And if your content is truly interesting, they’ll even subscribe to your updates via RSS or e-mail and refer it to others.

2. More Pages = More SEO Juice

Each blog post is a new page that search engines see, and therefore a new opportunity to get found online. Packing as much content as possible into a just few pages is not an effective search engine optimization strategy.

3. Incentive to Create More Content

After companies pack their websites with useful content, they often avoid adding new content to their sites. If you don’t have a blog, adding more content means redesigning the site and complicating the layout.

Shouldn’t you put yourself in a position that encourages you to provide more useful information to your site visitors?

Presenting the dynamic parts of your site in a blog will help you gain followers, improve your SEO, and encourage you to produce more useful content for your site visitors.

Your website should contain some information about your company, outside of your blog. However, this should be reserved for basic information that does not change often. The information that does change, such as news, offerings and events should be in a blog.

Many companies are already doing the right thing by offering useful content. They just need to make the change from presenting information in a static way to doing so dynamically through a blog.

This blog post is courtisy of Hubspot