Top 11 Tips for Leveling Up Your D2C

Leveling up your brand takes more than swapping in new marketing materials, a logo refresh, and a few social media activations. Your website is your crowning glory, your calling card, your ground central, your hub, your meat and potatoes—it’s your most crucial marketing tool for 2021, which means it needs to be optimized to its fullest potential for you to get the most out of it. Not only do you want it to run smoothly, look good, and produce results, but you also want to get more traffic. The first step toward getting that done is an honest exploration of your site that prompts real, tactical implementations. We’ve compiled a list of our favorite, most impactful tactics to help improve and optimize your site for better sales. For demonstration purposes, we will share examples from a food and beverage brand on Shopify Plus. Up your D2C 1. Run your site through Google's Page Crawler

When you see the list of issues come up (like the example above), fix them.

2. Content Strategy Refresh your content strategy by using keyword optimization, and target content for each persona defined on your site. For example, suppose you have a meat lover persona. Your relevant, targeted content opportunities could be related recipes and grilling technique videos, and your related, relevant, and researched keywords could be the four below. Come up with those keywords for each persona.

3. Educational Content Using educational content to drive traffic has become increasingly popular, and for a good reason: It can help boost your site’s searchability. Thanks to the pandemic, consumer priorities have shifted in 2021. A recent insights report from Brandwatch revealed that consumers say “learning” is one of their top New Year’s resolutions—a resolution that has never made it on the top 10 list in prior years, much less hit number two.

The new shift paves the way for content that engages and teaches—from basic lessons for novices to more in-depth, advanced tutorials.

4. Guided Selling Assets By helping navigate users to buying the products they want, there is an opportunity to create content to guide—help inform less educated users on their purchasing choices. For example, blog content helps them choose the right option that suits them and their needs.

5. Using Site Search Data Here's another tip: Use your search data to fill content gaps. We discovered some less obvious keywords—brisket, duo, ribs, and wagyu are regularly searched, but hard to find.

Audit your navigation. Adding key terms like brisket within the navigation will improve the UX and provide additional content for optimization.

Audit your navigation. Adding key terms like brisket within the navigation will improve the UX and provide additional content for optimization.

6. User-Generated Content User-generated content can sway and inspire, especially in the form of photos. With approval from the user, you can use them everywhere on your site from the home page to product pages to category pages. And, the increase in UGC is likely to increase conversion rates.

By utilizing UGC, you also become engaged with your supporters, your fans, and your customer base. You can even learn from the consumers the pros, cons, and areas that may need improvement for your product. It’s a win-win situation. They feel acknowledged, and you get great content, customer feedback, and trust. You can start with those who are already highlighting your product on social, like in the example below.