Organic SEO Marketing | New Delivery Channel Education | Mass Awareness
When South Africa went into hard lockdown in March of 2020… Famous Brands was forced to pivot several aspects of its different brands, to ensure survival in an extremely turbulent time with regulations changing almost weekly.
Challenge
One of the biggest challenges was the opening of a new product delivery channel to the nation – Kerbside Delivery. This new concept had to be implemented and communicated to the entire country, for all 2 464 restaurant sites. Also, almost every other restaurant in South Africa would be offering this service as well, meaning they would be sending out similar messaging. So, we also needed to find a way to cut through the communication of our competitors. Never mind that lockdown regulations could be adjusted overnight. We needed to conceptualise and roll out a communication plan that raised awareness about this new delivery channel, educated consumers around the procedures involved when it comes to Kerbside Delivery, drives trials, and cuts through the communication of our competitors.
Solution
With an extremely constrained budget, we knew that we had to use organic digital marketing techniques that can easily and quickly be updated as regulations changed, whilst also giving our brands the best chance of being discovered in the organic search results when consumers looked for information around food options. We implemented a 360-degree digital approach creating dedicated landing pages on our brand websites that informed the consumer about Kerbside Delivery, uploaded informational videos to YouTube and Facebook, and using YEXT updated 2 464 restaurant website pages, as well as Google Q&As with FAQ around Kerbside Delivery. We optimised all our digital assets with occasion-specific keywords and other keyword data to ensure that our information would be seen as an authority by search engines.
Results
By utilising our entire digital ecosystem, we created over 1 million opportunities to be discovered/crawled by search engines without the help of any paid media. One of our brands Debonairs Pizza, took Position Zero in the unbranded search results and became the number one source for information on the topic of Kerbside Delivery. In addition, five of our brands –Debonairs Pizza, Steers®, M&B, Wimpy, and Fishaways – not only dominated the 1st page of Google organic search for Kerbside Delivery, but also appeared first in the image and video results, as well as appearing on page 2 and 3. We even had specific restaurant website pages appearing in those rankings as well. The power of organic marketing allowed us to be flexible and dominate Google’s search results. Our restaurants were ranked as the authority on Kerbside Delivery and, as for the competition, let’s just say they got kicked to the kerb.
2 464 Restaurants x 16 Kerbside delivery terms x 28 live listings across 3rd party publishers =
