What is Warm Traffic?
These days, the digital component of a business is becoming more and more crucial to success – and if you feel that you’re constantly struggling to boost traffic on your website or social pages, you’re not alone.
Everyone wants to make a sale, but do you understand clearly what the customer journey is in the context of a solid digital marketing strategy?
It may or may not be easy to get noticed in the first place. But your challenge with warm traffic is to bring those customers from just noticing you to actually buying your product or service – and not just a financial buy-in; but also a psychological one. (master all the stages in an easy to read PDF here)
Remember, this is not just about selling. Through these four stages – contact, consider, convert, care – you’ll be building a relationship with each customer.
Once you’ve reached out and caught the attention of some new customers (“cold traffic”), you then need to “warm up” these leads and make them trust you. Think of it as offering them a hot chocolate and cozy blanket on a cold winter’s day.
And if everyone else is already offering the same, you’re going to offer free marshmallows.
Now, let’s take a look at how to generate warm traffic out of cold traffic.
Getting Beyond Awareness
Once you’ve generated some awareness via contact in the cold traffic stage, you can then work on warming this traffic up. Your goal here is to get them to consider purchasing your brand’s offerings. They’re not actually making a decision yet, but they’re at the first stage of that decision-making process.
The thing with digital marketing is that, unlike the old days where all businesses were brick-and-mortar, with many serving a specific geographic area, we’re looking at a global audience. So, during the warm phase, you’re going to want to use data to understand your “cold-to-warm” audience and target your actions towards making them even more comfortable.
Audience & Market
With your warm traffic, you want to target your promotional activities to the largest addressable audience that you believe is looking to buy actively. Ideally, this means getting them interested enough to move into the “hot” phase, which is that they’re ready to buy right away. They will have heard of your brand and be familiar with some offerings but will not be ready to make a purchase.
Where cold traffic was about anyone who theoretically can buy from you, your warm traffic is going to look like people who are actually looking for your product or service.
Mindshare
This audience will understand your value proposition and what differentiates you from the rest of your competitors.
They will recognize your brand or product, and they’ll already have an understanding about your offering – in other words, while they may not be ready to buy, they’ll be familiar and comfortable with something about your brand. Or they might think your information is so fascinating, unique, or useful that they won’t be able to resist “clicking” over to your next offer.
Messaging
What is that certain something that makes them click? How do you make them fall in love (or at least in like) with your product? It will all be in your messaging. Remember that you may only have a matter of seconds to show them this – today’s shoppers are savvy and have a world of choice at their fingertips.
You want your messaging for this segment to focus on driving consideration towards the next phase. Doing something unexpected or extraordinary – even if it’s just the way you tell your story – is a great way to catch their attention.
Some examples of innovative campaigns:
- The low-budget, mostly improvised 1999 film The Blair Witch Project still stands as one of the best promotional campaigns as of all time. Via a genius website, early social media and online message boards, their promotional trailer consisting of real-seeming “found footage” both confused and terrified audiences, making them curious enough to not only keep following the story but spend a lot of time talking about it.
- Boxed Water partnered with the National Forest Foundation and used influencers such as Alyssa Milano to share their #retree campaign far and wide. The combination of influencer authority and a worthy cause made the brand and campaign stand out as something worth caring about.
- Do any music fans out there remember how the band Fatboy Slim stuck Christopher Walken as the centerpiece to their video “Weapon of Choice” where he did an unusual dance routine with his characteristic deadpan expression? This was a strange and unexpected pairing but was so quirky (people wanted to see the actor known for his tough guy roles do a little dance) that music fans immediately started sharing it like crazy.
Marketing Platform
The marketing platform that you choose will (somewhat) depend on your product. You’re still sharing information, but now you might want to do something like offer a free product that gives them even more value and gets them on your email list, at which time you will have their attention to offer even more valuable products.
Here are a few suggestions of ideal marketing platforms to focus on during this phase. Your marketing strategy may vary depending on your business, but generally, these are good options to start with for the warm traffic phase.
- Display or banner ads still hold out as an effective way to move customers towards a purchase whether your traffic is cold or warm.
- Email marketing remains strong throughout the warm, hot, and converted phases of your funnel as it is inexpensive and wonderful for generating brand awareness, building authority, sharing information, and directly offering products.
- Pay per click (PPC) is a way of buying a “space” on a search engine which increases the number of visits to your site. Google AdWords is the most popular PPC model.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Video: Great for building awareness, offering valuable information, but not really for converting
Measurement
Choosing the right KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) will be crucial to how you not only assess your performance in each phase but also how you inform your strategy for all phases in the future.
Here are some suggestions:
- Click through rates (CTR)
- Page depth: This is a reference to the number of web pages a visitor will view during a browser session.
- Per visit goal value
- % of assisted conversions
- Growth in owned audience
Experience
Just like in the cold traffic phase, your job here is to educate and inform – only this time you’re going to want to focus more on getting them to move forward with a purchase than just making them aware of your offerings.
Conclusion
Since sometimes customers move through the decision phases from cold to warm, and from warm to hot, quite quickly (for instance, just by clicking on an ad), you’ll need to make sure the next step really stands out. You can do this by demonstrating clear value in your key offerings.
Remember too that your goal is not ROI – okay, of course, it’s ROI, but so is everyone’s goal. Your focus should be how to create a great enough experience for the customer that they are happy to take the next step(s) in the buying journey.
You’ll also want to bear in mind that buyer habits can change. Learning how to understand where they are at during each phase of the journey is key. The warm phase can tell you a lot about the types of actions that work towards getting them to “buy” into a long-term relationship with you.
If they understand their value, they are much more likely to invest.
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