Methods of developing sustainable growth

PHUKET: In six months, Thanyapura has doubled web traffic and engagement with our audience. But how did we do this? Is it possible for anyone to do so? These are all questions we were asking several months ago when we turned a corner in our marketing efforts and began to look at different strategies to make sure we saw growth, even in low season.

Understanding the needs of our customers, both online and offline, was essential to our level of growth in the past six months.

In the past, our focus was purely on promoting what we were doing, which was good for keeping our audience, but it didn’t help us develop sustainable growth.

We began making these changes at the beginning of May when we saw an average of 2,869 weekly sessions. Today, we are averaging 7,802 weekly sessions.

Thanyapura used these four methods to help double web traffic in six months:

BUILDING A BETTER EXPERIENCE ONLINE

It is important that potential customers not only find you online, but can also easily navigate through your website. This is why one of Thanyapura’s main priorities was running a full audit on the website.

We addressed this by: Removing 404 errors – Nothing can result in a more frustrating user experience than to navigate through a site only to arrive at a dead end. As a site matures, it is natural to restructure. It is key to redirect this traffic.

Interlinking – Connecting users to related content is important. It also works as a useful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool and can be rewarded in your overall score with search engines such as Google.

Being Mobile Friendly – Google recently updated their search algorithm to favor sites that are mobile friendly. If you haven’t done this yet, it’s a must, especially with over 50 per cent of our audience now accessing us and most sites via mobile devices.

CREATING QUALITY CONTENT

Thanyapura is a sports facility with an emphasis on triathlon, swimming and cycling. However, when we began to broaden our content to include fitness, wellness and weight loss we saw an overwhelming response.

This was the content our users really felt engaged with. It became important for us to reach out to our audience with the content they found desirable. It was content they could use in their lives and therefore, became a valuable asset to them.

BECOMING MORE SOCIAL

At Thanyapura, our main focus was to capture audiences across a range of social media platforms, which included YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Pinterest, Facebook, and Google+. In doing this, we had to focus on our storytelling skills and create unique and relatable content for each platform.

By building a following and loyal fan base, we became increasingly accessible to new customers as well as managing to retain our existing audience who have become ambassadors for our brand. They do this by freely sharing, commenting and liking pictures and stories we publish on our platforms, which builds our audience even more.

Social media is a wonderful tool to connect B2C and we expect this to grow over the next few months.

GEOTARGETING FOR LOCAL SUCCESS

It is very easy to target a broad audience when building a content marketing strategy and neglect your local target market. The very first thing we did to address this issue was to search for Thanyapura on a local level.

We made sure that Thanyapura could be found when someone was searching for Asia, Southeast Asia or Phuket for all of the things we offer. This did not happen overnight. It meant editing a range of content we already had and including alt tags on images, H2 headers, keyword placement and other tricks of the SEO trade.

By geo-targeting our primary pages for services offered in the local area, we were able to build awareness in the local community.

Additional reporting by Aaron Franklin and Isaac Congdon.