One of the most common pieces of advice you’ll hear from digital marketing experts is that you should never put all your eggs in one basket. In other words, don’t rely on one platform or strategy for your traffic, leads, and sales.
It’s sage advice for a number of reasons. First, no matter how popular or effective a platform or strategy is, it’s always subject to change. What works today might not work tomorrow. Second, relying on just one platform or strategy leaves you vulnerable if it suddenly dries up or becomes less effective.
If you want to succeed with digital marketing, you need to diversify your traffic sources and lead generation strategies. Here are four reasons why:
1. You Never Know When a Platform Will Change
No matter how big or popular a platform is, it can always change in ways that negatively impact your business. For example, Facebook has made various changes to its News Feed algorithm over the years that have led to businesses seeing less organic reach for their posts. As a result, many businesses have had to invest more in paid advertising to reach their target audiences on the platform.
Similarly, Google is constantly changing its algorithms with updates like Penguin and Panda that can impact where your website ranks in search results. If you rely too heavily on organic search traffic from Google, a sudden algorithm update could cause a sharp decline in traffic to your website. And if you don’t have other sources of traffic to make up for the loss, it could have a serious impact on your business.
2. Diversifying Your Traffic Sources Helps You Weather the Storms
When you diversify your traffic sources by using multiple platforms and strategies, you minimize the risk of being caught off guard by changes on any one platform or being impacted too severely by them. If one platform suddenly becomes less effective or stops working entirely, you won’t be left high and dry because you’ll have other sources of traffic and leads to keep your business afloat. This is especially important if you run a business that relies heavily on online marketing for sales.
3. Diversification Helps You Reach More People
Diversifying your traffic sources also helps ensure that you’re reaching as many people as possible with your marketing message. For example, if you only rely on organic search traffic from Google, you’re only reaching people who are actively searching for terms related to your business (and even then, only those who see your website in the search results). But if you also use paid advertising, social media marketing, and email marketing, you can reach people who might not be actively searching for terms related to your business but would still be interested in what you have to offer (such as people who are scrolling through their social media feeds). In other words, diversification helps broaden your reach so that you can connect with more potential customers and clients.
4. Diversification Helps You Grow Your Business Faster
Finally, diversifying your traffic sources also helps you grow your business faster because it allows you to scale up more quickly when necessary without putting all your eggs in one basket. Let’s say that organic search traffic from Google is currently responsible for 50% of the leads coming into your business but paid advertising only makes up 5%. If things are going well andyou want to start growing faster, it would be much riskier (and much slower) to try to grow organically than it would be to increase your investment in paid advertising so that it brings in more leads and sales more quickly. With diversification, there’s less risk involved in scaling up because you have multiple streams oftraffic and leads coming into your business instead of just one. Conversely, if one stream dries up (say organic search suddenly becomes less effective), scaling down becomes much easier since there are other streams still bringing leads into the top ofthe funnel
