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.

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Positioning in FMCG

Positioning of food products — a gift industry with a very specific workflow

FMCG (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. The substrate is imported from Belgium and the production is done handmade with attention to the smallest details. Chocolates are sold as souvenirs — gifts. 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. Well, there is nothing to judge the principal. The digital marketing consultant 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 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. 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 SPRINTs 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. 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.

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 off-page — all happening at the same time.

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. To paraphrase Ayn Rand — imagine a stick, at one end is success, at the other end is failure — and in the middle? Compromise in e-marketing activities is the lack of complete success, which means also failure.

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.

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 canonical 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 of the URL to the new one in sitemaps and changing internal linking throughout the CMS. Here, nothing automatically happened.

Counting the effectiveness of actions

Finally, 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. In Poland, with higher computer loads, the issue also lies. Online analytics must be treated as a separate issue here.

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 — FMCG 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)

Google Search Console

GSC gave an overall picture of the situation a year ago. Which phrases had a fair amount of queries — 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.

Ahrefs. Semrush.

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. Both Ahrefs and Semrush have their advantages and disadvantages. I treat the results of analysis from these tools as complementary data and present them in one table.

Google Analytics.

Here the acquired data was used to optimize what is on the site. 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.

Technical SEO.

I arranged these issues in my mind as a separate process. As a result, the lack of action by developers did not affect my 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 descriptions were no problem. Friendly URLs I also mostly managed to optimize on my own.

Content marketing.

Here my work proved to be the most intensive. 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, blog posts optimized for the main phrase, supporting phrases and long-tail variants.

The job of Digital Marketing Coordinator is also skillful delegation of tasks.

I outsourced the preparation of posts to a marketing agency, which allowed me to order slightly larger quantities of content.

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, creative and thoughtful way. 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 — just waiting for new content, which 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 — a week before the Holiday. Two weeks before the Holiday, blog posts also began to appear regularly every few days, so that until Christmas itself there was an upward trend in the amount of content.

Off-site activities.

I asked a friendly agency to "spice up" the activities with relevant links. I'm sure content-marketing did the job, and linking only accelerated the indexing and reindexing of the URL.

SEM Activities.

It turned out to be correcting the target campaign URL, phrases, and in Performance Max campaigns — rebuilding the entire product feed. Comparing traffic and spending in periods 10 to 8 days before Christmas (counting backwards), it turned out that CPC costs and overall costs dropped by a clear few percent. 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 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.

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.

Graph comparing traffic from the phrase "prezent na dzien kobiet" to the category page in the pre-holiday period in seasons 2022 and 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. If you want similar results for your business, book a consultation and let's plan your next sprint together.