Generating Traffic.

Mäd is delighted to have once again reached the top 100 websites within Cambodia, a testament to the work from our Phnom Penh team.

As always, data has no purpose unless analysed and used. Today we'll discuss some of our MarComms strategy and tactics that can aid businesses in gaining a better virtual footfall.

Defining KPIs.

Firstly, we asked the question: 'Do we want Mäd to be easily found, and visited on mass?'

For many businesses this is a no brainer, as exposure improves potential sales, right?

However, in various circumstances a brand may prefer to retain elements of exclusivity and mystery. Perhaps mass exposure simply isn't desirable. After all, if your potential clients make up less than 0.01% of the population, then why waste resources with general brand awareness campaigns.  

For Mäd, our clients tend to belong to an extremely small demographic. Within key businesses, we work with decision makers to improve operations, identities, and offerings. Originally, there was therefore no need to spend our time and resources bringing thousands of people to our website (daily) that were outside of our target audience...

But our mission changed.

Mäd doesn't have a sales team, but we do have a MarComms team and long term strategic plans. As part of our road map, we wanted to become more than a simple service provider. We defined various additional goals to aid our market positioning:

• To inspire, and motivate, better processes and practices.
• To encourage individual and team growth through continuous learning.
• To share and develop ideas for better business.
• To avoid complacency.

Traffic as an indicator.

With our goals defined, we realised that to spread productivity tips and inspiring insights, we needed a traffic strategy.

Simply put, great content would have no value if no one was discovering it.

Our team would therefore need to focus on producing content of universal business appeal, that would closely reflect our brand and typical clients— yet offer quality to a wider audience.  We value insights that offer actionable betterment for individuals, teams, and overall business functionality.

By tracking our website views, we are able to gauge the effectiveness of our SEO, SEM, and SMM when building our audience.

How to track your views.

We use the Alexa plugin, from Amazon.  

This allows us to quickly gain a daily overview of our traffic, whilst monitoring the crucial website speed. Note that faster loading websites aid SEO scores, and encourage longer website browsing.

Key Challenges.

As we aim to avoid complacency, self-audits are a regular occurrence.

Previously using workwithmad.com in 2020, we decided to refresh our identity and purchase Mad.design as a more fitting, contemporary url. By taking on a new URL, all our previous ranking data was reset.  Furthermore, all previous branding exercises to associate 'workwithmad' as a key brand identity would be phased out (or at least to the sidelines) as we pushed our new domain.

With .design being a fresh, novel extension, some work was needed to familiarise people with this—as a valid website address/extension.

Instant Traffic: Advertising.

SEO can be time consuming, taking weeks or month to spring to life. Once your website starts ranking well, constant maintenance and competitor awareness is needed to ensure your ranking quality and relevance is maintained...

However, SEM and SMM is instantaneous.

By creating campaigns through Google Ads and Facebook, we were able to generate thousands of impressions within the first hour of our new domain going live.

Whilst we aimed to gain good brand exposure, we also wanted to target those most likely to be interested in our agency. To do this, we were able to define technophiles and those generally interested in the design industry.  Thankfully our client list is extensive, so we were able to build up character profiles based on our existing business relationships.

Whilst we pointed potential client advertising to relevant service pages and case studies, we also invested in sharing our design thinking to a wider audience. Using the advertising platforms, we were able to identify students and key age demographics to share our insight series with. We wanted to ensure our insight campaign was fuelled on offering value, as part of our CSR initiatives: sharing our growth and knowledge with the community.

We believe that knowledge sharing is important. Some agencies may hoard their secrets, but we believe that the business landscape grows better through collaboration and healthy competition. If you continually offer great ideas, you'll push yourself to ideate more, rather than guarding a precious few thoughts.

Traffic Sources.

To conclude our humbling achievement, we have some general considerations for improving website traffic.

• Newsletters.
  In Q4 of 2020, we launched our new Mäd newsletter series.
  We publish this monthly with an overview on our new project wins and content updates. With the introduction of our expert interview series, and expansion of our MarComms team, we've been able to produce and highlight meaningful content geared towards client interest.

• Writing for others.
  As highlighted above, we create content with purpose. We try to avoid clickbait and listicle articles built purely for personal SEO gains, instead focusing on solving client problems or sharing actionable business practices. Our library is ever-growing with quality business-related publications, which challenges our team to prosper and expand their mindsets.

• Social Media.
  Our social media strategy has been clearly defined to regularly share website content to our relevant platforms. Static content links back to our website to encourage readers to explore Mäd.design instead of staying on said social media platforms.

• Affiliate links.
  Communities prosper together. By working alongside clients we refer and receive website traffic to promote our working relationship and past projects. This also aids SEO, but more directly these links sends new users to our website.

‍