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Video: Focus on Conversions or Building Traffic First?

What’s more important: prioritizing conversions or building traffic? The simple answer is both. Here’s why you need to balance your efforts for the best results.

The argument for building traffic or optimizing for conversions has no end. Like we stated in our earlier post, it’s a chicken-and-egg style debate. If you don’t optimize for conversions, what is the point of directing traffic to your site? On the flip side, if you don’t build traffic, who is visiting (and converting) on your site?

The problem is countless variables affect which of these goals you prioritize and when. Determining what you should be investing more energy into is dependent on your business, your strategy, and your target audience. Make sure you’re considering all factors when determining what makes the most sense for your brand and its online presence.

Why focus on conversions?

There are three main arguments for prioritizing conversion optimization:

Low investment, high yield: The return on investment is significant, especially given the low cost of entry and easy process.
Traffic optimization: while you may not increase traffic, by focusing on conversions you can increase the value of visitors to your website.
Reinvestment potential: conversions will help generate funds to reinvest in your marketing effort.

All of these arguments focus on quality over quantity. By prioritizing conversions, every visitor becomes more valuable. Even with lower numbers of visitors to your website, if your conversion rates are high, you still realize a substantial return on your investment. The low cost of conversion optimization also makes it easy to implement without breaking the bank. We’ve even done some of the work for you, giving you tips when creating your landing pages.

Why focus on building traffic?

If you aren’t getting visitors to your website, there’s no point in worrying about conversions, right? But that’s not the only reason building traffic should be a priority. A few benefits of focusing on traffic include:

Brand recognition: visitors will become familiar with your brand and content
Momentum: concentrating on traffic is a long-term strategy and committing to the long-term gives your marketing efforts time to build momentum.
Optimizing for value: there are a lot of metrics affiliated with building traffic, this allows you to collect and analyze data to see how you’re doing and to constantly improve.

By increasing traffic to your website and familiarizing new audiences with your brand, you have more opportunities to generate leads and those leads can turn into sales.

Why balance is the answer

The most important thing to remember is that your content marketing strategy is a work in progress that is continually being tweaked. You’ll need to spend time and money prioritizing both building traffic and optimizing for conversions. Here’s Jennifer Hart Yim, Director of Strategy at Fronetics, to explain why we think you need to focus on both to maximize your efforts.