How to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy: 5 Key Takeaways

Cynthia Stephens, VP of Demand Generation for Lionbridge, had difficulty finding a reliable option for home delivery of groceries during the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020.

With the usual suspects unable to keep pace with the atypical home delivery demands caused by the pandemic, she dug deep into Google searches. By chance, she stumbled upon the option that best suited her needs—a farm not 15 miles from her house that had never before been on her radar.

According to Stephens, this problem of visibility in front of your target customer plagues many quality e-commerce and B2B companies today.

“If you’re not present in search results, you’re not present anymore,” she says.

In a webinar with media technology company BrightTALK, Stephens moderated a panel of Lionbridge marketing experts who discussed how to stay competitive as businesses around the world turn to digital and content marketing.

In the webinar, learn:

• What is SEO? How can you optimize your website to make sure it is present in search results?
• How can you improve your digital marketing strategy?
• What metrics should you measure to create an effective digital experience?
• How do you use resources at your disposal to build a high-performing content strategy?

Five ways to improve your digital marketing strategy

An effective digital marketing strategy starts with setting your site up for success. The most compelling content can’t perform to its full potential if your website is holding back its visibility.

To improve your digital marketing and web presence, measure and optimize your site speed, site security, your sitemap and geotargeting capabilities.

Improve site speed

The longer your page takes to load, the more likely it is your potential customers will click away.

According to Google, as page load time goes from one to three seconds, your bounce rate increases by 32%. If the load time goes up to five seconds, you could lose as much as 90% of website visitors. The search engine prioritizes websites that meet consumers’ expectations for speed.

Google’s quick-loading benchmark hovers around a maximum of three seconds for both your desktop and mobile site. Brendan Walsh, Global Technical Search SME for Lionbridge, suggests using tools like GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to ensure your website is hitting the mark.

Ensure security in the buyer’s journey

Next to speed, Walsh emphasizes that site security optimization is the most important ranking factor for search engines, especially within the e-commerce industry. Ensuring your customers’ data is secure establishes your site's measure of trust. Without this metric, Google’s bots penalize your presence.

Security starts with migrating to HTTPS hosting, but it doesn’t stop there. “Google wants users to remain on a secure journey even after they’ve left your page,” Walsh notes.

To hit this mark, you must ensure that everything on your site—from videos and images to outgoing links—all keep web users in a secure space.

Ease bot navigation

Your robots.txt and sitemap are important to ensure search engine bots understand and index your content. As your e-commerce presence grows, not all of your products will naturally link back to a main menu or landing page. However, you still need to make sure it’s not hidden from bots.

Make it easy for search engines to index everything you offer by doing the following:

• Organize a clear and comprehensive sitemap
• Optimize your robots.txt file to point bots in the right direction
• Ensure that no content is unintentionally blocked

Add structured data

Structured data, also known as schema markup, is code that guides search engines. By speaking Google’s language, you tell the bots what you want to be highlighted for your audience—like product price, availability or customer reviews.

Relying on schema markup helps search engines flag your pages as relevant to users’ search intent while enhancing your listings’ appearance with rich and useful information—so your product pages, other pages and media stand out among search results.

Utilize geotargeting

When selling internationally, your website should be responsive to a potential buyer’s location.

Optimizing your site for geotargeting ensures that what pops up for a user’s search, is specific to their region. It also adjusts to prioritize local SEO, content, imagery, language, currency and any other location-adaptable aspects of your e-commerce site.

How to use a data-driven approach to reach your audience

Your content needs to resonate with your target market(s) to engage and convert customers in those regions. Comprehensive audience research is crucial, especially when dealing with international marketplaces. Understanding who your customer is—and their values and their pain points—should guide your content strategy.

Optimize your audience research

The rise of e-commerce offers unrivaled access to an international market—but access doesn’t equal interest. The content you create should answer questions that attract relevant traffic, which requires your team to think locally in the global market.

“If you’re going international, look to create independent pages that fit the search behaviors in that region,” says Sandra Wendland, Global Digital Marketing Manager for Lionbridge. Wendland suggests a data-driven approach to analyze key phrases and terms based on local search intent, for both text and voice search. If your content isn’t performing well, it may not be aligned with local consumer culture or behaviors. You may not be providing the answers to the questions of your local target market(s).

Language is also important, and machine translation may not get your site ranked. To access a non-English market, research language-specific SEO keywords for that area and deliver quality answers that speak to the related buyer persona.

Use insights from across the company

Don’t forget to include insight from other departments into your digital marketing strategy. Sales team members are the ones out in the market(s) talking to your potential buyers.

Mike McKenzie, Senior Manager of Demand Generation for Lionbridge, says a successful sales strategy stems from bridging the gap between sales and marketing.

According to McKenzie, your sales team has “the knowledge of what other people are looking for, beyond just the data.”

These day-to-day interactions help your sales team gain a sense of your audience’s wants, topical interests and current pain points. Apply your sales team’s insights directly to your content creation to address what you know about buyers’ most relevant concerns in real time.

Watch the full webinar to learn more from Lionbridge’s marketing experts about designing and maintaining your high-performing content strategy.

Interested in more e-commerce tips? Read our e-commerce disruption series, which explores how the pandemic has impacted digital retail spaces.