How SEO and Social Media strategies helped an Organic Foods e-commerce entrant gain significant organic traffic, better website ranking and noteworthy traction at social media
Executive Summary
A new e-commerce brand wanted its organic & social reach to be significantly enhanced through digital marketing interventions. GenY Medium put the digital strategy together and executed it right from a pre-launch ‘Splash’ campaign to the launch and growth phase.
The interventions delivered the following:
- An engaging and ‘viral’ pre-launch campaign which brought in over 5000 consumers, who were informed and ‘ready’ on Day 1.
- Through various SEO interventions, the traffic was driven from scratch to the levels seen by the top 3 players in the category, within a span of 6 months.
- Social media content publishing and campaigns which gave the brand one of the highest reach and engagement scores in its category.
Situation Analysis & Challenge
The brand aspired to be the leader in the niche category of organic and ayurvedic products (tradi-tional medicine), selling through an e-commerce portal.
The competition comprised a large number of unorganized players and a few large e-commerce players, who were primarily grocery e-commerce companies, delivering the entire basket of house-hold products, including organic products.
The brand needed an out of the box approach for creating a mark in this vertical. The approach needed to:
- Micro-target the segment of consumers who would be positively inclined to consume such products.
- Launch it in a unique manner which had the potential of getting the likely consumers drawing in people like themselves in a viral manner
- Focusing on SEO and social as the strategy to beat the might of paid advertising $s
Our Approach
GenY Medium went full throttle on the below aspects
Unique pre-launch campaign:
From the inception, this brand was envisioned to be a platform for people who love nature and believe in nature’s produce – honest and unadulterated. Before the launch, a community was created using social media to bring all like-minded, nature-loving individuals together through a unique referral contest.
Each individual who chose to be part of the community was provided with a unique URL to share and spread the word about the community. Those who chose to spread the word ended up getting 5 more to join the community. The target audience was defined precisely, going beyond the obvious segmentation based on age, gender and geography to a psychographic segmentation.
Content-led search optimization:
Search results had been a focus from day one. Used content for ranking in search. Informative blog and creation of a rich knowledge base on herbs are some interventions which led to a steady improvement in search results. Some of the important aspects of the search optimization efforts are detailed below:
- Keyword Analysis & SEM – Based on all the available products on the platform, all the possible search terms were analyzed. The website was optimized for all the identified keywords, and the same was used while writing the blog and knowledge base. The unique content was created ensuring that the ‘long tail’ of keywords led to this brand. To further boost these search terms paid search was used for ranking for high intent keywords.
- Blog – Dedicated blog about living organically was been regularly updated. Amongst e-commerce ventures in the country, this was a unique element. The blog was not only meant for branding but also for potential transactions.
- Knowledge Base – A repository of original, well-researched articles on the health benefits of ayurvedic herbs had been created. The repository coved over 200 herbs. Besides providing information on herbs, the repository also linked the herbs to products on the portal which contained the particular herb. This was aimed to bring organic search traffic as well as lead to transactions because of the product linkage.
- Google+ – The focus on content-led search optimization continued further with the usage of Google+ as a platform and adding to the blog content on a regular basis.
Social Community and Engagement:
A well thought engagement strategy was formulated to drive social media engagement. This included regularity is posting.
- Relevant posts – While health and wellness is the broad platform, several thematic posts were posted like “The History of Medicine”, “Grandmother’s Home Remedies”, and so on.
- Hosting online contests/events for the community – A few engagement driving contests had already been organized on social platforms (Facebook & Twitter). Example- a contest, named, “Confessions of a food-o-holic” encouraged users to make an online confession of their food-related obsessions.
- Hosting offline events to enhance brand equity – A panel consulted over 150 people on their health issues, recommending ayurvedic solutions through a unique offline event. The event was conducted at the brand’s office in Noida and Gurgaon. The event was a great success benefitting the participants and the brand received an authentic database of buyers.
Other activities
Apart from Social and content Social Bookmarking was used to improve traffic on website for branding and transactions.
Results
The results were highly appreciated by the brand.
Pre-launch Campaign – Around 6000+ registrations were received even before the launch of the website, comprising of people, who were eager to use what was being made available!
Search Ranking – The brand ranked 6/10 while their competitors (popular e-commerce portals on the same category) ranked 3/10. Also Google suggested the brand name while typing “Satvik” (meaning pure) in search
SEO – The brands products appeared in the top 3 results of Google. For example, search on ‘health benefits’ for herbs etc. showed the brand in #1-3 results.
Results
Alexa Ranking – The results were encouraging as per the Alexa rankings. The brand had a rapid growth in its reach, importantly; it has caught up and actually overtaken competition at a much faster rate.
Blog – The blog had ~6200 subscribers and growing. Engagement on the blog was visible from the comments, questions and appreciation from the users. Not only, has it enhanced the brand association with health and nature but also has led to transactions.
Facebook – The brand’s Facebook community had rapidly ramped up to over 80,000 fans with a weekly reach of over 1 million! The engagement numbers were high, reflected in the over 10% ‘talking about us’ numbers. Industry experts say that 0.5-2% engagement is considered well thereby putting the brand’s Facebook community amongst the top engaging pages, globally.
Social Engaging Posts – posts like “Grandmother’s home remedies“ and others combined generated 5-15% virility, which was considered to be high.
Online Campaigns – Campaigns reached thousands of individuals with hundreds of submissions and invites. Example “Confessions of a food-o-holic” campaign reached over 36,000 individuals, resulting in 150+ submissions and 170+ friend invites. Several used this as a platform to confess before their family!
Conclusion
GenY Medium’s digital strategy helped the brand reach their goals. Organic traffic increased, website rank improved, social media audience engagement was high, and campaigns had high response rate.