Traffic acquisition is only half the marketing equation.

In addition to bringing visitors to your website, you need to keep them there. Not only that, you need to transform them from interested prospects into customers. Your website needs to move the relationship forward (and seal the deal).

And once they complete their first transactions?

Conversion optimization is the process of transforming new website visitors into paying customers — and first-time customers into repeat buyers.

This is a concept that every online marketer needs to thoroughly understand. If you don’t have a website (or marketing strategy)that’s optimized for conversions, you’ll end up wasting your web traffic.

Conversion optimization isn’t rocket science. In many ways, it’s common sense. But you need to actively think about what you’re doing. Know your best practices.

You need to convert your first-time visitors into repeat buyers.

You’ve built an amazing website, mobile app, or online storefront. Your brick-and-mortar customers love you, and you have the Yelp reviews to promote.

Now what comes next?

If you build it, they will come.

Just kidding. If it were that easy, the multi-billion dollar internet industry would be totally useless.

Your website could be amazing, but it’s probably hiding in a digital dark corner where web traffic is like the lochness monster. As much as you want it to exist, it doesn’t.

So what should you do?

You need to actively think about how you’re going to bring new visitors to your website. You need to build your traffic acquisition strategy. From paid channel advertising to content marketing, you have a range of options. We’ll get to these topics but before we do, we want to explain a key concept:

Audience connections.

You need to leverage your traffic acquisition strategy to connect with the right audiences — people who are most likely to become paying customers.

If you’re new to online marketing, you’ll probably read a lot about blogging, paid channel advertising, and social media marketing. This guide is going to take a different approach — we’re going to give you the holistic education you need to build a powerful marketing framework. Traffic acquisition is so much more than your SEM strategy on Google AdWords. It’s the single-most important marketing strategy for reaching your target audiences.

So let’s get to it. Here’s a bird’s eye view of the traffic acquisition landscape.

Tell Your Brand’s Story – Human-to-human connections are the heart and soul of business. At the end of the day, you’re dealing with people — your company is solving problems, alleviating pain points, and providing delightful customer experiences. Revenue is something that happens as a byproduct of a sound business model and a positive customer experience.

Storytelling is a powerful technique for building relationships. It’s an age-old concept that brings people together and keeps them engaged. It doesn’t matter where in the world you’re based or how much funding your startup has.

Good stories give big voices to small ventures. That’s why it’s mission-critical that companies take the time up front to fully develop their approaches to storytelling.

Storytelling and marketing go hand-in-hand. Just think about it. Whether you’re producing infographics, writing copy for a Facebook ad, or writing a free online guide(like this one), you need to capture your audience’s attention.

On a daily basis, consumers (yourself included) face advertising overload. Marketers are constantly competing for their prospects’ and customers’ attention. More likely than not, your brand will be buried under spammy advertising messages.

How can you make your brand stand out? Storytelling.

Chapter 3 is an all-inclusive guide that explains why your brand should prioritize storytelling and how your organization should get started. This is not fluffy stuff, either. Storytelling is a powerful and actionable marketing technique. Convinced? Let’s get to it.

Now, you need to build a scalable, sustainable marketing engine. Think about it:

• You wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint.
• You wouldn’t start a business without a business plan.
• You wouldn’t take a road trip without your navigation system.
• You wouldn’t build an online app without wireframing the UX.
• And you wouldn’t spend six figures on a house without knowing what you’re buying.

Why should your marketing plan be any different?

Whether you’re spending $100 on Facebook ads or $100K on customer education videos, you need a carefully planned strategy. Trust what we say when we tell you that spray and pray is not an effective approach to marketing. Every marketing plan needs to start with the results that you want to achieve. ROI is not a guessing game.