214: How to build a traffic strategy (and why you need one) | Nicki Sciberras

Do you know how much traffic you actually need to sell your products or services? 

Nicki, the head Strategist and Founder of The Digital Exchange does and she is going to tell you what you need to know about creating your own traffic strategy. 

Let’s be real, manifesting clients sounds fun, but we need to know the numbers to actually build a plan and strategy around our business marketing. This episode of The Content Queen Podcast (ep 214) is going to tell you how. 

If you LOVED this episode, make sure you share this on your Instagram stories and tag us @contentqueenmariah and @⁠thedigitalexchange.co⁠.

⁠⁠⁠✨ ⁠⁠⁠⁠JOIN OUR LIVE ROUND OF CONTENT BOOTCAMP⁠⁠✨⁠

KEY EPISODE TAKEAWAYS 👇

  • What is a traffic strategy? 

  • The importance of a traffic strategy in growing your business

  • How to create a traffic strategy

  • Which traffic channel is right for your business

  • Free vs. Paid Strategies (pros and cons)

SHOW RESOURCES 👇

If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @contentqueenmariah⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

Other than that, enjoy - chat next week 💕

ABOUT THE GUEST

Nicki is a Meta Ads and SEO strategist and coach. An expert in her field, she helps online businesses profitably grow and scale their brand so they can live life on their own terms. 

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

This is episode 214, and I'm talking to the amazing Nikki, all about traffic strategy for small business owners, why you would need it. What is it and how to get started. Welcome to the content queen podcast. I'm your host, Mariah entrepreneur, storyteller, digital nomad, creator of content bootcamp and founder of content queen.

I'm here to teach you how to share your unique story, create content and market your business with strategy through the channels that work for you, you and your business. Each week I'll deliver a story to help you connect to a powerful strategy around marketing, business and content creation. I'll also be joined by amazing souls and entrepreneurs who are here to share their own journey along with actual steps to help you take your business to a whole new level through amazing storytelling, powerful aligned marketing and content strategy.

Let's do it.  Welcome from Peru!  We have left Colombia, which means actually recording a podcast is a little bit easier because, bless the Colombians, obviously I love them, I fell in love with one.  They love music, they love noise, it is never quiet, so we are in an apartment block in Lima,  in sort of like a popular area,  and I barely hear anything.

It is actually so crazy, the difference. Uh, so  That is what we're experiencing right now. So we left Colombia and we're now in a new country. We're here for Six weeks or five five weeks. Uh, and then yeah, we're going to Machu Picchu. It's gonna be my 30th. I'm super pumped Uh, so make sure you're following us if you're not Our travel journeys you can just follow my My page, not content queen page, which is Mariah underscore content queen.

And there's so much more about travel and I can't remember if I shared this on the podcast, but we did get engaged. So mom and dad of content queen are getting married. It's all happening is so much exciting things happening. And also in the business, so many exciting things happening because  we are hosting our live round of content bootcamp, which we haven't done since 2020.

And this is like a six week. Call every second week homework in between it's very hands on when I say, you know live round it is Really one of these programs. I'm not just teaching you you are doing the work and get something at the end of it You have something to take away So if you have been looking to just dive a little bit more into your marketing get familiar But actually come away with something content bootcamp is for you If you're listening to this on the week, we have our live call on Thursday, if you're in Australia, Wednesday, if you are on US time,  I'll put the link in the show notes.

It's not too late to join. It did say start in the week of the 19th, but the week of the 19th was homework week. Let me know if you have any questions. If you're listening to this after the fact, and we're in the midst of it, just contact me. Let's see what we can do instead. Otherwise, if you're listening to this after the live round, join, because If you join, you will get access to one free live round.

So when we decide to do it again, which I'm thinking November, but it might even be sooner because I feel like this is just so needed, but basically you will get access to one free live round. And also after it three months free into the DIY content marketing club, it is an ecosystem program. It's not just about like, here's the course of goodbye.

It's hands on. You come away with something tangible. We have a live round, which you get access to for free and you continue the in the membership. So anyway, that's my tangent.  If you are looking to become more  aligned, more educated, more actionable, intentional with your marketing  and your content, Content Freak Camp is here for you.

So.  Join us. We would love to have you. So I'm excited to welcome in the founder of the digital exchange, Nikki. I'm going to go through sort of traffic strategy and the five things that you need to think about when building a traffic strategy. Of course, what is a traffic strategy and The thing that happens a lot, and it was perfect timing when Nikki reached out to me, because basically what entrepreneurs and small business owners get really confused with is marketing and sales.

And I'm not blaming you for this. It is like we all do it, right? We all get caught up in thinking that marketing is generating sales. It is part of the funnel or the process to get sales. 100%. But the Success, quote unquote, success of our marketing comes down to traffic  and that's what it's about. And then the sales steps in, right?

It's like in corporate sales and marketing are two different departments. So we need to think about that when we're doing our content creation and our marketing. That is also why our content shouldn't be super salesy and should be, you know, directing people to the sales  part of our strategy.  So I'm excited for this one.

There is an amazing resource that Nikki shares as well. So make sure you listen to where she shares that and it's in the show notes.  It's epic and it'll help you a lot understanding traffic versus sales. So basically I'm going to introduce Nikki, I'm going to go through the five things and then I'm going to come back and recap.

Nikki is a meta ads and SEO strategist and coach, an expert in her field. She helps online businesses profitably grow and scale their brand so they can live life on their terms. Love Nikki, love what her ethos is and what she teaches. So let's chat with Nikki all about traffic strategy. Welcome, Nikki, to the podcast.

Thank you so much for joining us. Can you please tell everyone a little bit more about who you are and what you do?  Hello, everyone. And Mariah, I'm so excited to be here. So I am the founder and head strategist at the Digital Exchange, which is a paid ads and SEO agency. And basically, we help businesses grow and scale so that they can live on their own terms and We're based in Australia, but we have clients worldwide.

Amazing. Absolutely love it. We need you. We need to learn more SEO. So we all need you in our lives. So everyone has an origin story and I do love to start with origin story because it really helps people connect to you as a person and what you've built. And it always, you know, a nice time to reflect on why we started.

So yeah, why did you start your business? And yeah, how did you get to where you are right now?  I actually love this part of your podcast. So I hope I can do it justice, but  so essentially I studied, um, advertising at uni and I had like, I'd studied a business degree and I always wanted to be in business from a young age, but I didn't know how that would look.

So I studied uni and then I took off to Europe for six months. Like you did, um, actually got offered a really good job before I left, but I decided to go for this once in a lifetime trip with my sister. And I came back. And I got offered pretty much the same role with the same company. So, I mean, it was, it was very lucky, but that's kind of where my corporate journey started.

And I went from having like being like a marketing assistant to coordinator, to a manager. And I held that role for a number of years. And I think when I was in that role, I kind of started to feel like I was like locked in the walls of that building. And I hated kind of working that rigid nine to five schedule.

I craved like having more time with my nieces, more time to travel. Um, I maybe uncapped income as well. And I wanted to be able to go to the gym at 10 or do whatever else I was doing. And a lot of people in my family had businesses, so I could kind of see how that lifestyle was looking.  I also had some health challenges.

That made it hard because I was traveling a lot and working really long hours. And I was carrying a lot of the bulk of the work, um, for our team. And then it kind of happened that two of my two favorite staff members both got pregnant and they were like, Nikki, you need to escape now. You need to plan your corporate escape in between us having children.

So I, I did do that. I ended up leaving and five years ago, I started miss marketing, which was. a full service marketing, um, business that I started out with. And then last year, I rebranded to the digital exchange. And we now focus on meta ads and SEO. And we have our clients for that. And we manage those areas for clients.

Sorry, we manage paid ads for clients, but we also have programs in SEO and meta ads.  And yeah. So that's where we are today.  Oh my gosh. Amazing. I love it. I love that. The people at your work told you to leave. Like, I feel like the people that want what's best, you're like, get out now before  it's too late.

I love it. And that, that's awesome. And I, you know, I think when we're starting this journey of entrepreneurship. It's always nice to have our role models. And it's so cool that you had family, because I think some people really struggle with that because if family don't understand the whole business dynamic, then it is hard to leave.

And to, you know, there's always those doubts and, and everything, but absolutely love it. As I said, we all need to learn more about Facebook ads or meta ads. And, um, SEO, I think is one of those things that all of us feel like is super daunting, but once we understand it and I think have a proper strategy.

It's like anything in marketing. There's always jargon. There's always things that we probably don't quite understand. And that's why we need experts like you. So  when you talked about coming on the podcast, you shared this, the traffic strategy, and you mentioned there was sort of four key points to kind of cover around this traffic strategy.

And I'm very keen to learn more. So first, what is a traffic strategy? If people listening like, yep, that sounds.  It's self explanatory in sort of a degree, like getting traffic somewhere, but  I'm sure there's so many elements to it. So what is a traffic strategy?  Yeah. So I'll break this down because, you know, as a, someone that's done marketing for 20 years in my head, everybody knows what traffic is, but it's not true.

And so essentially for those that may be just starting out or haven't really got into their marketing yet, traffic is essentially all the visitors that come to the place that you want them to land. So whether it be your website, your landing, landing pages or content or your social media, essentially. So it's the eyeballs or the clicks from your marketing efforts.

To your website. So essentially it's your clicks that are going to take people to your offers so that they buy your book. And if you're not getting any traffic and you're not getting people moving to your website and places like that, you're actually not going to, I guess, grow and scale your business to where you want to have it.

So with that in mind, a traffic strategy is the strategy that you have to get visitors to your website or to those landing pages. So it can be things like, you know, social media or Facebook ads or Google ads or influencers email marketing. So there's all different. Yeah. There's all different types of ways that you can get traffic to your website, but you just need to understand your audience and your industry.

I love that. And, and it's, it's interesting with, um, something that I mentioned when we were chatting is. You know, when we think of posting on social media, for example, we always think like, Oh, why am I not getting in sales now? Like, but that's actually not the metric we look at with marketing. We look at traffic, right?

Because your sales and your marketing should work together, but they are two very different things. And, you know, some things happen when we're creating content or when we're marketing our business. We might be like, Oh, well, I've made no sales, so it's not working, but we're not actually looking at the core metric, which is traffic.

And then is our website actually doing the selling for us and converting the clients or the audience? So I think it's, you know, one of those things we need to be realistic without marketing and what are the core focuses of, you know, the channels we're on, whether they are, you know, using ads, using social media, using a podcast in our marketing.

And then if, and I always like to. Share this when I'm doing measurement, you know, how do we look at where the gaps are? And if you're getting the traffic to your website and it's not converting, that's the place you need to spend time in. If you're not getting the traffic to your website, then you know where to focus in that sort of funnel process.

So I love that you mentioned that, because I think sometimes we can get. Whilst they should work closely together, marketing and sales are two very different things and we need to, um, I think because we're doing all the things in our business, sometimes we forget, but in corporate, they are very separate departments as you would have  really, you know, known working in corporate.

I remember how separate our teams were in, in marketing and sales, which is not always a good thing. So

the importance of, um, you know, you mentioned some of the importance of.  You know, formal formulating a traffic strategy to grow your business. And this is even for entrepreneurs and small businesses.  What do you say to people that are like, well, this kind of sounds like a big corporate thing, like this traffic strategy.

I don't know. It just sounds like I'm not quite there yet. I don't need to look at that. What do you say to clients or people that you've educated on traffic strategy? What do you say to them? Yeah. So just touching on your sales funnel, um, a moment ago, I love, and I'll touch on that more in a moment, all the different levers that you can pull to, I guess, having have to get less traffic to your particular website.

But I think what I would say is that it's super important to have a strategy in place. And that's why all the corporate businesses do. So you may think, oh, is this something for corporate businesses only? And it's like, well, it's not. That's why they are in the successful place that they are today. It's because they have put a plan in place.

And what we see a lot of businesses do is that they're actually winging their marketing. So they're throwing a social media post up here. They're throwing a few SEO keywords on their website. They're boosting a Facebook ad. So they're wasting time and they're wasting budget without without actually any plan on how to get to the destination that they want to get to.

And that's kind of a reason we created this freebie that we put out recently and essentially what it does is.  It calculates how much traffic you actually need to hit your revenue goal. And then what you can do is use that to reverse engineer your marketing plan. So it will help you to work out how many clicks you need to get through to your website, to your revenue goals, but then you can work backwards and go, okay.

So what marketing am I going to use to get these clicks through to my website? And as you touched on earlier, a lot of people aren't even looking, say when they put a post up,  if there's any traffic coming from that post to their website, a lot of the time we might, we, we aren't getting any clicks from our social media through to our profile or even to our website.

And it's really important to check those metrics. If you are using social media as a marketing tool, because if you're not, Then you need to  implement other types of engaging material to increase that or look at other types of marketing channels to bring you that traffic that you need. And you'll see that only about two out of every hundred people that hit your website buy.

So you're going to need a lot more traffic than you think. To actually, you know, hit those revenue goals.  Oh my God. That sounds like an amazing preview. We have to put it in the, in the show notes. Cause I feel like everyone's like, Oh my God. And I love that, you know, working backwards process. And it's interesting what you say about social media, because I remember a TikTok I watched a couple of years ago.

And this woman analyzed all the big corporates that were spending a lot of money on social media. And actually that wasn't where their website traffic was coming from. So that's where looking at the numbers is super important. And looking at where the traffic is like hitting, like going to a website from, because I did this a couple of years ago and I realized actually organic search is my best  traffic driver, you know, and where do I spend most of my time?

On social media,  massive reality check. Right. And, and then you go, okay, where do I need to focus more of my energy on this year? And that's a really good way to start, you know, building some kind of plan and strategy because we just assume, actually, I ask this question a lot  when I say to someone, where does most of your traffic come from?

And they go social Instagram. And I say, well, why do you think that they say? Cause I spend the most time there. Is that actually true? We look at the numbers. No. So it's actually other, you know, content channels and, and, or different, maybe even different platforms. And that's where you can start to see where, you know, there's, there's low hanging fruit everywhere and we're just not utilizing it because we're not actually looking at the numbers.

I love that you say that because. And, and coming from that, you know, numbers perspective of how much traffic you actually need and social media, as we know, engagement goes down at least 20 percent of like, you know, on average, if you're lucky 20 percent of your audience will see your content, then they have to take action to go to your profile.

If we're looking at Instagram, then they have to click on your link in your bio to hit your website. Right? So there's so many other, even like your marketing content, even like content isn't just social media. And this is what I hop on about all the time, but there's so many other. I think strategies that we can start to utilize and that's where I guess you talk about ads coming in because that allows you and we'll talk about that later in the questions that I have, but  paid obviously allows you to expand that reach as well.

So I think it's nice to always. Um, and I love that you can work out, you know, how much traffic you need to get your revenue goal. That sounds amazing. So how do we create a traffic strategy? What does this look like? We've sort of touched on it a little bit, but I'd love to know sort of the process or what recommendations you give for people to create their own traffic strategy.

Yes, I would love to share this, but before I do, I do want to challenge everyone listening to go to your last few posts  and have a look at how much website traffic you actually got. Because I can guarantee you it is not that much and you are going to be better off investing your time elsewhere. But I'm also going to show you some hacks through, well not show you, I'll tell you some hacks  on how to work that out.

But Essentially, what you want to do is you want to work out and you can do this using our calculator, how much traffic you need to get your revenue goal. Then what you want to do is you want to work out how much traffic you're actually getting right now. So you want to, and then you want to deduct that from your goal amount of traffic.

So then you can work out how much extra traffic you need on average per month.  Then what you want to do is, and you can generally do this in Google Analytics. Otherwise, there should be some analytics in the back end of your website, depending on what your, what platform you're using, but it will show you where you're getting your traffic from.

And I want you to look at that list of where the traffic's coming from. And I want you to have a think about the time that you invest in those different channels. Now, if you're investing a little amount of time, but you're getting a lot of traffic. Say like Mariah did with her search engine optimization.

Did you say you were, were you investing much time in it or not really? And it was just paying off. Uh, I had a weekly blog, but I was outsourcing it and it wasn't, you know, and now I've actually worked a bit smarter with my blogging, but not, not like social media. No. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, a lot of people will find that search engine optimization is driving or SEO is driving the most traffic, but they're actually not actively doing anything.

So imagine what it would be like if you actually did. Um, start working towards implementing that, but then if you go to social media, you'll look at the traffic and you might be getting like one click every three days. So if you have to get a hundred people to your website and only two buy, it will take you at least a month to even maybe get one purchase or two months.

So, and then it's really, it's really hard to even grow your social media following these days. And then you need to grow it to start to get more clicks and hardly anyone's seeing your content. So.  Anyway, once you've got how much traffic you need, then you look at where you're investing your time, then you can, so if you look at those numbers and think, okay, I'm not investing much time into SEO, for example, but there's a lot of potential, then you could ramp that up  and then you could look at other areas that your potential audience are hanging out on.

So I would think about my best customer and where they hang out, and then I would potentially start looking at ways to implement.  the marketing channels that they would be hanging out on. But you'll find that most people are searching on Google. So SEO is never going to go unnoticed. And it drives, so SEO or organic traffic, it's 54%, 54 percent of it comes from search engines.

So it makes sense to implement your SEO.  But then most people are on social media. So like Facebook, Instagram. So using ads, once you're ready to scale is always, you know, great. If that's somewhere that you can sell your particular products, you know, for example, if you're a trading tradesman. You'd be more looking at something like Google ads because people are looking at you more urgently than say Facebook ads.

So you also need to think about the kind of things that you're selling, whether those platforms would be appropriate. But yeah, essentially, if I lay it out in some quick, simple steps, it's calculate how much traffic you need, find out how much traffic you're already getting and deduct that from your goal number.

Then you've got your leftover amount,  look at where you're currently investing and ramp up the areas that you're getting the best ROI from, and then look at your,  your current audience or your best customer and look at where they're hanging out and start implementing some  marketing that you know, that they will be looking at and, you know, influenced by  so simple.

Sounds like we could do it right now. I love that. It's so actionable. Yeah, literally. And, and it's, yeah, it's just such an interesting conversation to have because  you know, there's so much noise and don't get me wrong. Like social media for a lot of my clients is a big, you know, we always look at the numbers and that's, you know, where they, but the people that don't look at the numbers, they just assume.

You're kind of marketing blind, right? And you see all this noise, you know, there's big marketers out there, your Gary V's and your influencers that are making millions on social media and you look up to them and be like, Oh, well, I can get there. And  absolutely, maybe you can, if that's a goal and you focus on that and things like that.

But we're business owners, we're not professional content creators. Even though we do become content creators without sort of realizing it because we're, you know, online doing bits and pieces to promote our business, or we're, you know, creating something in some way, whether it's a.  A blog, an email, things like that.

But, you know, it doesn't mean that we have to do what everyone else is saying. We need to do what's actually working for our business. And I find we can get sucked. And it all happens to us all, you know, that shiny objects syndrome, like, oh, that looks like, you know, Tick Tock's new or, um, you know, threads is new, which.

You know, we don't know what's happened to that now and often we  jump from platform to platform and it's exhausting. And that's, I'm really big on trying to get entrepreneurs off this content creation hamster wheel and really being smarter about what they're creating and how they're repurposing. And like, for example, you know, I've got clients where podcasting is actually where a lot of their clients come from harder to track.

But they know from, you know, asking, where did you find me or things like that. And we can easily repurpose their podcasts onto Instagram and social media. So actually we're getting a lot of mileage from that podcast, right? Rather than creating different pieces of content here, there and everywhere. And then spending a lot of time, which equals money on  implementing stuff in different places when we could be working a lot smarter.

And then I'm sure as you recommend, you know, utilizing organic content that performs quite well as ads. It's because, you know, we always know that if people connect  organically, then they can potentially connect with it through. That paid kind of platform. So,  yeah, you did mention, you know,  paid versus free, like what, how do we determine what is the best thing for us right now?

And, you know, how can we decide when it is time to go down this sort of paid route, say we do have a big revenue goal and maybe paid ads looks like it needs to be in this space, or how do we know.  You know, based on our traffic number or things like that, when we do need to start going down that paid route and yeah, what, what does it first, like in a traffic strategy, how much do you recommend people implement towards paid versus free?

And I mean, everything is kind of paid these days, right? Even social media, even though it's free, it still takes us time, which is paid, right? Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing you may not be paying for it, but you are paying for it in your time, which is super valuable because. We just don't have that much of it, particularly as business owners.

I feel like time just flies every day. So,  but when it comes to a free versus paid strategy, I would say it depends on where you are in your business. So like how long you've been going for, and then also on your budget. So generally we wouldn't recommend starting to run ads until your conversion rate on your website is about 2%.

So your conversion rate is how many people that buy or book. That have, uh, divided by your visitors. So say if you've got 100 people that visit your website, if two buy your book, that's, that's a good average amount. Until you're at that particular percentage, I wouldn't even kind of go looking at ads. And you want to kind of have about a thousand people coming through your website doors to make sure that number is actually a fair number.

Because sometimes you might have five people when you first start your website, but two or three of them convert because they're all people that know you. But, you know, so they're a lot warmer. But  I would say when you first start out, SEO is a really great place to start because essentially it's like another team member that works in the background.

It doesn't require a lot of maintenance. It could just be set up within say four to six weeks, spending five hours each week, getting it done. So it's setting up your, the technical side of your website, it's setting up your keywords. And then just getting links from other websites to yours, which help build trust with search engines like Google.

So I would be starting off some somewhere that like that, so that it's constantly building. And it doesn't, it's not like any other form of marketing SEO. A lot of things like ads, as soon as you stop paying, they turn off or as soon as you post, it expires within 24 hours. SEO is just running in the background on Google for you all the time.

And the more it's, the longer it's running, generally the better outcome you're getting. So I would say start out doing that. Obviously. It's great to have an online presence on social media, but it's not going to drive traffic. It's just good to, I guess, show that you are there and alive as a business and people can come and come and find you if they want to see what you're about and then you can send people on to your website from there.

Then once you kind of have that all set up and you can see that you're starting to get some traffic through the door, email marketing is great to add. It's got a good return on. Investment it's every dollar that you spend, it's, it's got like a 40 return on investment, super high, probably the highest of any, um, I guess, content or marketing channel that you do.

Then after that, then I would look at starting to implement ads when you're ready to scale your business. So everyone knows I'm a big fan of Meta and Google ads. So yeah, once you're ready to scale, go into that. I'm also a big fan of collabs. So this is, I guess what you and I are doing right now is a collab.

So Mariah's been kind enough to have me on her podcast, but essentially I'm getting exposure to her audience and then she will get exposure to my audience when I promote.  What she does, um, and the podcast as well. So that's a really good way to get,  I guess, free eyeballs on what you're doing. So I think that's really good to do when you first start out and it doesn't have to just be through podcasting.

It can be things through teaching masterclasses, whether it be for Mariah Gate, it was saying, um, local council before even I do it for a lot of different  online programs. So I'm actually doing one straight after this. So in half an hour this time, I'm teaching a group on an introduction to SEO.  Love it.

Yeah. So that's another way you can do a co lab, but yeah, you don't want to really start out in paid advertising until you have a proven business model, because essentially what you're going to do is you're going to be pouring money into a leaky bucket. So if Yeah, if you don't know that your author is converting, then you definitely don't want to put money, money on the table.

If you know that it's working and people want it, whether it be a service or a program or a product, then it's okay to put some money behind it. Now, I also touched on earlier some different levers that you can pull. So. Yes, you want to get traffic to your business, but another way that you can hit your revenue goal easier is to,  you can increase the average amount that you charge for what you sell.

So, for example, if I was to increase  an hourly rate from 100 to 200 an hour, that would actually halve the amount of traffic that I need to make that revenue goal.  And equally to that, if my conversion rate on my website was 1%, if I got it to 2%, then I'd only need half the amount of traffic to  Be able to actually hit my revenue goal.

So just a few things to keep in mind is, and you'll see that in the spreadsheet that I've put together, you can play with the numbers to find that sweet spot and Mariah touched on earlier, yeah, different parts of the sales funnel and on your website. So if your website's converting at a good rate, then yeah, you don't have to put anywhere near as much work into the marketing side of it.

But obviously the more traffic you're getting. The more, the more sales you should be getting overall.  So good. I love that because also, yeah, as you say, if you get this really high  traffic.  Oh, what? That feels really hard. Then at least you can have a play around. Can you increase your conversion rate by, you know, optimizing your pages or learning more about your audience and playing around with the sales pages?

Like there's so many things that you can do, but understanding the numbers is like the core of it, right? Like understanding what you need to hit in your business and then what is actual reality and then what's the difference. And I absolutely love that because I think. That actually makes it super simple and then we can start focusing on and just something that I've mentioned to a lot of my clients as well because obviously like I would love them to spend all their money on content marketing with me, of course, but sometimes it's not actually what they need and I'm not going to sit here and be like, yeah, let's just, you know, spend all your marketing budget on content because.

It can work in different ways. And that's why I think marketing campaigns are quite effective as well. Like for example, you might not recommend, you know, depending on the business that like a service based business put lots of money into ads in December and you might like in face in meta, you might recommend, okay, this is a good time for you to invest in maybe actually like getting some collaborations ready for the new year.

Or so there's always like different way, different times of year that we can focus on different elements. And I think that's. It's something that I think we feel like, Oh my God, if I focus on just this. And as you say, SEO can be one of those things that you set up and it's not a lot of work. You know, you might say, all right, you too.

My focus is SEO. I'm going to spend X amount of money in this time. And then once it's set up, I only have to spend then. You know, smaller amounts. I think often we get stuck in, okay, I just have to post on social media five times a week. That is it. But maybe you cut back on your social media posting.  Okay.

Siri wants to join in the podcast.  Um,  she doesn't have an answer, so she doesn't know, but then you can obviously start to look at different areas in your business where you invest money in. And I think that's. And I love what you say with like pulling those levers is you get to decide when you focus your energy in certain places based off your goals.

And, and that's, what's really important is strategy goals. The things that we love that a lot of small business owners think they don't need, but they absolutely do. Uh, so before we wrap up, is there anything else that you need, we need to know, or that you want people to understand about traffic strategy that we haven't touched on?

I think we've covered it all, but. As you said, I think it's just really important to make sure that you set the goals and know your numbers because when you use the calculator, you, as you said, you will see that those numbers for traffic are quite overwhelming. And that's probably why you haven't come close.

If you haven't yet to hitting your revenue goal, but yeah, just understanding how you can pull the other levers, like increasing your website optimization through speed and other ways  will make the job a whole lot easier. So there are ways to simplify it. Don't get overwhelmed. There's always a way.

That's it. As long as you have a plan in place and you're kind of taking little bites off it each week, I promise you, you will, you can, and we'll get to where you want to go.  Oh, that's awesome. That's a really good message. Cause I think, yeah, it can be super overwhelming and there are, you know, love them.

There are people on social media that manifest their,  however, 1 million business. Great for them. I don't think they did. I think they did a lot of work and there's so many other elements and factors as how they reached their million dollar, whatever.  But that's a really important message is like stay in your lane, what you need to focus on, what your business is doing.

You know, it is hard to compare ourselves with people that say what they say on social media. It doesn't mean it's always true. You know, their profit could be terrible. We don't know.  Uh, they could have been spending a lot of money and not getting, you know, from a profit perspective. So I love that message because I think, you know, there's always, there's so much that we can do.

But it's understanding what you need to do for your business. So I absolutely love that. Thank you so much Nikki for sharing your wisdom. I really  appreciate your time. How can people find and connect with you? And yes, we will have that spreadsheet in the show notes. I want to download it. I'm super curious.

It sounds awesome. So yeah, how can people find and connect with you?  Thank you for having me. I've had an absolute blast. I love talking about traffic. So,  uh, you can find me at the digital exchange forward slash traffic. If you want to download that particular guide, obviously my website is the digital exchange.

co  And you can also, I also have a meta ads download too, if you want that. And basically you can work out if your business is ready for meta ads without spending a cent. So that is the digitalexchange. co forward slash Facebook. And then my Instagram is the digitalexchange. co as well. So they're all the same.

Thank you so much. We'll have those in the show notes. They sound great. I love that because it, and that's the thing, you know, we're empowering people with their marketing, not sending them down a rabbit hole. So I love that you're giving people the power to decide where they need to go. And I absolutely love that.

So thank you so much for joining and sharing your wisdom with us. Of course. Thanks again for having me. Now, I don't know about you, but one of them I think is the core takeaways from here is understanding  how much traffic we actually need. And it's not about, um,  and sort of understanding where each channel plays in the journey.

So for example, in marketing content, marketing is very top and middle funnel con like in the funnel ads. It's more of the bottom SEO is more of the bottom or middle to bottom. So really understanding where our marketing efforts are going and where each plays a role. And this is why I am not about spending all of your time and energy on content, spending all of your time and energy on social media.

It is about creating something sustainable. So you're able to.  You know, be across different channels or work across different platforms and different marketing strategies so you're not funneling yourself into one space. So then maybe when your leads dry up in that space, you're not like, Oh my God, I've got to start somewhere new.

You've already got other places and you're kind of spreading your wings, so to speak.  I think this is a really important episode. I love that Nikki highlights things about social media and understanding where our website traffic is actually coming from and where we should spend our time. So this is about being intentional and when we create strategy, we do that.

We are intentional and then we measure and then we see if it's worth spending our time there or not.  Let me know what you thought of the episode. You can do that by leaving a review or you can come over to socials and tell me, but be a content queen or king and remember that developing your strategy and your story develops your business.

Thank you so much for joining me today and please don't forget to share this with all your business and entrepreneurial friends. Nikki's entrepreneurial friend shared it with her, and that's how she came on the show.  You can do this by adding it to your Insta stories, tagging me at contentqueenmariah, or just share it with them, hit the share button.

And if you do rate and review, it does really help me  promise and deliver to you extraordinary content. That's how we get more guests. That's how we're able to put more resources into this show. So leave a rate or review if you haven't and follow me on Insta, follow me on TikTok and tell me if there's anything you want to know or any questions that you have around content marketing or marketing, reach out.

We can do episodes on this. We can get experts on, but I don't know what you need unless you tell me. Otherwise, I will talk to you next week. We'll still be in Peru, but maybe in a different place. Bye. 

PodcastMariah MacInnesmarketing, marketing advice, how to be authentic online, business ownerComment