2020 has been the year of digital marketing. With more businesses incentivized to invest more into digital marketing and optimize their websites, the digital space continues to grow as an integral part of a business. More businesses are using Facebook Shopping to leverage social media in order to drive website traffic and increase sales, or Google Ads to bring in website visitors who are actively seeking a product or service a business offers.

We expect digital marketing to continue to grow in 2021 and beyond. To help you adapt and thrive in the digital space in the New Year, we have come up with six digital marketing tips you may find useful in 2021. Enjoy!

1. Measure Website Interactivity

   While vanity metrics such as clicks and impressions are excellent starting points to assess your digital marketing or website performance, we recommend going further with your data analysis. This means gaining customer insights and analyzing your digital marketing website performance more in-depth.

   Looking into which buttons your website users have clicked and how far they scroll down helps you analyze website behaviour and build hypotheses about your users’ purchase intention and the quality of your website visitors. These insights also help you optimize your website and digital marketing programs accordingly!

2. Invest in Local SEO

   Investing in Local SEO should be at the top of every brick-and-mortar retailer’s to-do list. Local SEO refers to improving a website’s search ranking for geo-specific queries. Examples include “Vancouver auto repair” or “Richmond sushi”. Local SEO is important for brick-and-mortar retailers because it helps websites attract shoppers who are in the vicinity and looking for a product or service retailers offer.

3. Use Text Analytics

   The abundance of textual online content and the frequent use of textual searches on search engines, such as Google or Bing, provide business owners a phenomenal opportunity to analyze online textual information and unravel consumer insights.

   Businesses can run text analytics to see which products or services customers are frequently discussing online, whether there is a positive or negative attitude towards a product or service, or specific keywords that customers use to describe a product or service.

   Gaining these insights helps businesses better understand customers’ attitudes towards a product or service, and then adjust their marketing messaging or operations accordingly. For example, if an automotive dealership analyzes its Google Reviews and sees that a majority of the negative reviews contains specific keywords about an operational issue such as “slow customer service” or “no follow-ups” regarding the service department, the dealership can use this information to make improvements to the service team.

4. Improve Mobile PageSpeed

   The number of global mobile users continues to rise, making the responsive mobile version of the website an essential part of a business’ overall website performance, and one key component that every business must optimize is mobile pagespeed.

   Mobile pagespeed refers to how quickly a mobile website loads. Generally, you want your mobile version (along with the desktop version) to load within three seconds when a user lands on your website. There are several factors that affect the mobile pagespeed. Common factors include the web server or image file size. If your hosting server is slow, it will likely take longer for your mobile page to load. If you have large image files on your website, it will also take longer for the browser to load your webpage.

   To fix this, look into different website elements and see if there are any opportunities to compress file sizes. If you need help optimizing your website pagespeed, feel free to get in touch with us!

5. Create a FAQ Page

   ‘Why?’ dominated the 2020 Google Year in Search. Online users entered why-based queries such as “why can’t I sleep” alongside other question-based search terms in Google. This shows that a new searching trend has emerged: instead of searching for a product or service type, shoppers are entering questions for which they are seeking answers. To appear on Google search results for question-based queries, businesses can create a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page and write content that addresses specific questions that businesses’ target audiences often search for online.

6. Scrape Website Content for Competitor Analysis

   Website scraping refers to extracting website content and downloading the content as a file such as Microsoft Excel or CSV. You can use software or programming languages such as Python to scrape vital website content from competitor websites. For example, you can scrape information like sales prices and product names or categories from competing websites to see what your competitors are offering. These insights can help you price your products or services and adjust your offerings competitively.

   We are ecstatic about what 2021 will bring. With optimistic news on the rise, we hope the global health and economic conditions are moving towards the right direction. For companies that are putting the pedal to the metal and want to thrive in the New Year, investing more in digital marketing and the web is fundamental to your business’s success.

   By using the digital marketing and web tips above, you can stay ahead of your competition. Invest in digital marketing programs that directly benefit your SEO performance, gain customer insights that you can use to improve your campaign and sales results, and keep a sharp eye on your competitors’ pricing and content strategies.

If you want help with developing a digital marketing strategy or executive technical digital marketing program for your business, please book a discovery call with us!