Positioning in FMCG Positioning of food products, at a specific time, with specific results
For a Poznan-based chocolate manufacturer, I worked on the positioning of their chocolate selection. The following is an amazing success story
Positioning in FMCG
Positioning of food products, a gift industry with a very specific workflow
FCMG (fast moving consumer goods) - is an industry that has long been a dream of mine. Right from the start, in order to get a good understanding of the scale of the project, it is necessary to explain a bit about my partner's business approach. The chocolates that are produced, are not sold as chocolates. As curiously as it sounds - that's exactly what it is. In the customer's mind, therefore, I am not competing with Wedel or Lindt. It's a bit of a shame, because the quality of the product is described by the manufacturer as the highest. The substrate is imported from Belgium and the production is done handmade with attention to the smallest details. I haven't eaten any sweets for some time - so it's hard for me to relate to these claims. For the purposes of the article, this had to be specified. Chocolates are sold as souvenirs - gifts. Subjectively, I saw this idea as a business misconception. Gifts are a very rhythmic subject. They sell in short intervals - on specific occasions. An additional difficulty is that competition is everywhere. Every store and every product can spin in the same sales funnels. For example - the flagship product - chocolate tools. Such tools can compete with fishing stores, sports stores. Also in time: the competition is intense on any one occasion. Moreover, the competition is not only products, but also places - specific stores and large market squares. The manufacturer on chocolate phrases is practically non-existent - which is a pity. Rose chocolate is a hit of sorts, and there is little competition.
Well, there is nothing to judge the principal. The digital marketing consultat, just got to work.
Digital Marketing Coordinator - as of yesterday
The company works with external agencies, and my role was to be reduced to finding quick - wins, coordinating the work of agencies, defining new strategies and the rhythm of activities.
In a nutshell, I was given quite a challenge at the start.
Numerous difficulties to take in coordinating online marketing
The team of e-commerce developers
The development team is not responding to reports of basic errors (of which they are not infrequently the authors), it is hard to suggest e-commerce optimization. I am not writing here to complain. An attentive reader, familiar at least a little with the industry, will notice a mass of shortcomings in the described e-commerce. Optimization of many issues here is still a song of the future.
SEO activities in sprints.
The state of e-commerce is one difficulty. The second and definitely more complicated - is the intense rhythm and short intervals. Here action in SPRINT`s is the daily bread.
We have a mass of occasions in the year like Grandmother's / Grandfather's Day, Valentine's Day, etc. Some of the occasions are combined with activities related to the phrases "gift for" e.g.: gift for mom. There are forms of chocolate "for" e.g. "for a gamer". Chocolates from these forms are sold all year long. Sprints here should be combined in activities with long-term tasks.
Cannibalization of content
The first difficulty is the numerous phrases. Gift for, present for, etc., there are seriously a lot of them.... Here we have a great many phrases that are intertwined in their characteristics. Some are associated with a short marketing action - such as a gift for women's day, others with all-year sales, such as "gift for her". On the site, the cannibalization of content bites your eyes. You can see a mass of categories, subcategories, filtered results, gleefully created URLs and those created automatically - by clumsy mechanisms. I don't think I need to mention the duplication of products in categories. The same products "for women's day" and "for her" - standard-in a bad sense of the word, of course. Some sensible methodology had to be devised to organize this chaos.
Another scowl stems from a rather specific product: a chocolate telegram. The manufacturer has molds for the letters, and you can create yourself a message in the form of several lines with a certain number of characters. Such a thing is arranged nicely by the ladies in production, packaged and sent to the recipient. The product has a proprietary name - which has not been undertaken to promote (neither the name nor the product). The situation presents a difficulty, for example, in the case of the phrase "apology gift". Google has chosen for itself such a telegram and there is no way to embrace the cannibalization of phrases.
A specific rhythm of activities.
A dozen business opportunities a year is not a slight task. The action "from opportunity to opportunity" had to be split into complex multitasking.
- SEO activity planning,
- planning of SEM activities,
- implementation of SEO activities - on page,
- SEM activities and
- SEO activities - offpage
Everything was happening at the same time. Finally, there was a moment for data analysis. These are activities which, by reason of their staggered timing, are kept interspersed with different occasions. So breaking a large marketing project into small tasks, was connected with combining different tasks from different periods - occasions.
Resistance of matter. If you want to have a new quality in business results, you have to assume that the work being done will look different than before. It is impossible to work "as before" and expect a different quality of results. Anyone who occasionally looks at this site knows - that I am a perfectionist in my approached to achieving my own goals. The more ambitious the goal, the more competitive the industry - the more attention to perfection is necessary. To paraphrase Ayn Rand - imagine a stick, at one end is success, at the other end is a failure - and in the middle? Compromise in e-marketing activities is the lack of complete success, which means also failure.
So it was hard for me to overcome certain topics and the fact that not everything will be done 100%.
The speed of the site - both at the hosting level and at the developer level has stuck. The solutions proposed for developers were not acceptable. Even the Valentine's Day tango-down of the site didn't make anyone think, act, or even implement a site speed analysis tool. I implemented this analysis on my own for my own purposes.
Crawl Budget - here the issue started at the level of the site map itself. Very extensive, it had numerous links to pages like 404, 3xx. In addition to the xml maps themselves, I had to focus on the quite weirdly implemented cannonical addressing, The introduction of "friendly URLs" on selected pages opened a closet from which corpses sprinkled. Normally, the implementation of a new URL in a good CMS, automatically causes a
- changing the URL to the new one in sitemaps
- changing internal linking throughout the CMS.
Here, nothing automatically happened. I have already mentioned the sitemap problems. Internal linking was not corrected before. Only redirect entries in .htaccess were added. Optimizing this file was a separate challenge and took a certain amount of time accordingly.
Counting the effectiveness of actions
Finally, not to be too colorful, the issue of counting the effectiveness of actions remained to be solved. GTM codes are badly implemented in the html code. This causes repeated problems with conversion counting in Germany - where the cookie message is binding (i.e., it does something more than just display itself). In Poland, with higher computer loads, the issue also lies. Online analytics must be treated as a separate issue here. The service needs to be configured from scratch. In the context of the implementation of Google Analytics 4, this is quite a good solution. Separate everything with a bold line and start collecting correct, complete data.
In summary, the initially planned work included:
- sitemap optimization
- improving internal linking, .htaccess file, removing redirect loops
- attempts to speed up the site
These tasks had to be set in motion for the already concrete marketing activities to have any chance of having any effect.
Women's day gift - FCMG positioning in a short sprint
Even before Valentine's Day, I suggested that the most interesting phrase for which the site should be optimized was : gift for women's day. The activities started.
Selection of the right phrase (robust phrase analysis)
The selection of the phrase itself was done by analyzing several tools
Google Search Console
- gave an overall picture of the situation a year ago. Which phrases had a fair amount of queries. It's obvious - when you're beating yourself up for every customer - you should open the doors through which the largest number of customers will come. The second aspect of the analysis - the average position, or potential traffic. Even the most ambitious phrases, sometimes you should let go - if the visibility of the domain is a deposit of about 40-70 positions. Thus, numerous phrases with a high number of searches, confronted with a real chance of business ROI.
Ahrefs. Semrush.
But more so Ahrefs. These two very similar tools give a lot of interesting data. In this case, I used them for phrase analysis. I checked whether the data from Google (Search Console) clips into a consistent story with paid third-party tools. Ba, sometimes the usual change in trends is noticeable, and what was biting one year may not necessarily be lucrative the next. Both Ahrefs and Semrush have their advantages and disadvantages. I treat the results of analysis from these tools as complementary data. what's more, I even present them in one table.
Google Analytics.
Here the acquired data was used to optimize what is on the site. I don't think anyone will deny that it's important which products display highest on the category page.
Digital Marketing Coordinator gets started
It's a lot of fun to watch an initially chaotic, dysfunctional e-commerce project work in an increasingly organized and coherent way.
Picking out a specific keyword phrase, and several related ones, was the beginning and basis for further work. A quick audit of the category page and product key pages gave a concrete picture of the work needed to be done.
Technical SEO.
I arranged these issues in my mind as a separate process. As a result, the lack of action by developers, the lack of any communication, did not affect my enthusiasm and enthusiasm for the work.
On- site optimization
Titles, meta description, friendly URLs, internal linking and content on specific pages had to be optimized.
Rewriting page titles and meta desrciption were no problem. I did it on my own and a little with sentiment, I was reminded of the "old" days when this was my daily duty. Friendly URLs I also mostly managed to optimize on my own - although it kicked out the XML from the product feed and had to generate them anew, manually. This is not the first time, nor the last time, that a developer's blunders have translated into the creation of new tasks for other teams. The main thing is that it was not a surprise and the bugs were eliminated the same day.
Content marketing.
Here my work proved to be the most caloric. I arranged the numerous selected phrases into a coherent plan to optimize the various pages.
- Category page-optimized for the main phrase
- product pages-optimized for supporting phrases + paragraph optimized for the main phrase with internal liking
- blog posts- here I proposed several posts, some optimized for the main phrase, some for supporting phrases, a few for phrases with the so-called "long tail". In addition to playing "for sure" I like to test various chances for "quick - wins".
The job of Digital Marketing Coordinator is also a skillful delegation of tasks.
I outsourced the preparation of posts to a marketing agency, which, in the absence of technical possibilities of on-site work, allowed me to order slightly larger quantities of content.
I received texts according to the agreed schedule, i.e. first the category page, then product descriptions, finally blogs.
In SEO done for a specific date, the groundwork is a proper plan.
Thanks to the fact that I got down to the work early enough, I was able to work in a relaxed way, that is, in a creative and thoughtful way at the same time effectively. As a result of timely action, I already had a category page optimized in the same week as Valentine's Day. Product pages, also had everything possible optimized, they were just waiting for new content - these appeared online the following week - i.e. 2 weeks before Women's Day.
The first effects of the increase in Google positions were already visible the following week, that is, a week before the Holiday. This is a positive sign, information that the work is having an effect and promises further increases.
Two weeks before the Holiday, blog posts also began to appear. They appeared regularly every few days, so that until Christmas itself there was an upward trend in the amount of content.
Off-site activities.
Does linking work? In this article I will not answer unequivocally - yes or no. I asked a friendly agency to "spice up" the activities with relevant links. In the spirit I was deeply hoping for an answer like "ok we will act". And so we did. By no means did I want to be a participant in the chatter titled: "quality of linking and links in a marketing agency".
I gave the order. The agency accepted the order. It started linking something. I had the results. The agency was not billed for the link profile. Relatively everyone was happy.
I'm sure content-marketing did the job, and linking only accelerated the indexing and reindexing of the URL. . Although these are only my beliefs and no one will ever provide evidence "for" or "against" such a thesis.
SEM Activities.
Digital marketing is the various channels of customer acquisition
At the time most of the work I was supposed to do was already done. Those tasks that I could delegate were relegated. There came a moment to look at what was happening in SEM.
To improve, it turned out to be correcting the target campaign URL, phrases, and in Preformance Max campaigns - rebuilding the entire product feed. However, at the very beginning of the "season", comparing traffic and spending in periods, for example, 10 to 8 days before Christmas (counting backwards), it turned out that CPC costs and overall costs of "adwords" dropped by a clear few percent. SEM is not the topic of the issue here, however, it is worth noting that ambitiously implemented SEO issues translate into a decrease in SEM costs.
Positioning in FMCG - the effects of positioning a women's day gift.
At the very end of the article I will add, that the finale of Women's Day gift sales - is not Women's Day. From the date of March 8, you need to subtract 3 days for the processing time of the order (made by hand) and for shipping. In 2023, Women's Day fell on a Wednesday. So the desired sales "peak" was supposed to fall on Sunday.
How did it turn out? I invite you to look at some interesting charts.
Positioning effects according to Google Search Console
Graph of traffic and average position for the phrase 'women's day gift' coming to the category page in the run-up to Christmas 2022.
Graph of traffic and average position for the phrase 'women's day gift' coming to the category page in the run-up to Christmas 2023.
Graph of the average position for the phrase 'gift for women's day' coming to the category page in the run-up to Christmas in the 2022 season.
Graph comparing the average positions for the phrase "gift for women's day" directed to the category website in 2022 and 2023 (in the following days before the holiday
Graph of traffic and average position for the phrase 'women's day' coming to the category page in the run-up to Christmas 2023.
Graph of traffic and average items coming to the category page in the run-up to Christmas in the 2023 season.
Wykres porównujący ruch przychodzący z frazy “prezent na dzien kobiet” na stronę kategorii w okresie przedświątecznym w sezonach 2022 i 2023.
Positioning effects according to Ahrefs and Semrush analysis tools
Screenshot from the Semrush tool, showing the given URL, in 5th position in Google's free search results.
Screenshot from the Ahrefs tool, showing the given URL, in 5th position in Google's free search results.
Positioning effects according to Google Analytics
Graph showing the increase in users over the whole period of operations, compared year-on-year to 2022/ 2023.
Graph showing the increase in revenue from free search results over the entire period of operations, compared year-on-year to 2022/ 2023.
All the work took 17 days. The website jumped from the "depths" of the Internet to the 3rd/4th position and from the free search results of this one particular phrase "gift for women's day" alone brought 51% more revenue than the previous year. This is quite a success, as no additional paid work was involved. The effect was solely due to correctly planned, coordinated and executed work. Similarly, Google Ads generated an increase of several per cent in revenue with almost a doubling of the budget.