Virtually every company is thinking about how to drive digital growth, getting more and more visitors and maybe even establishing something like an online community driven by forums and social networking type functionality. VCs still believe that the number one driver for valuation of a digital business is number of visitors. So how to do you really drive digital growth? Here are my top lessons learned from projects in the media and comms industry:

1. Make sure you have SEO compliant coding of the website
2. Employ SEO and online marketing specialists to drive traffic
3. Use site visitor analytics to understand their behaviour on the site and to adjust your content and navigation accordingly
4. Perform a connected customer analysis to understand what is hot in the market, what are people talking about etc. to adjust your content accordingly
5. Execute on focused 3rd party deals to drive traffic and brand awareness with specific relevance to your site
6. Create sticky applications like tools and games to increase hits per user, visit length but also get additional users by allowing them to share the tool with others
7. Drive cross sales between your offline business and digital, eg with deals or links related to your offline products that drive traffic to your website
8. Configure a site search engine with solid categorisation and predictive functionality to drive traffic through search visits
9. Write good and dynamic content to drive repeat traffic
10. Use personalisation features to engage users with ‘their’ site
11. Drive organic SEO by cross posting on other sites that have high page rank value
12. Pay bloggers or review sites to write about your site or, even better, specific contenton your site
13. Use of rich media and multiple channels (e.g. mobile access) to drive enhanced customer experience and traffic

Just my two cents…