Digital marketing during the pandemics (Part I)

In 2020, the whole world went through a year that looks like a scene from a dystopian movie when we think back on it today, a year that we have a hard time reconciling with reality.

When we had not yet grasped the seriousness of the situation, when curfews had not yet begun, when the issue was slowly gathering snow before descending on us like an avalanche, we were on our way to Adana.

Not knowing that it was the last face-to-face meeting we would have for a very long time, we came together with Gizerler company.

The Adana-based Gizerler brand is an important brand operating in many fields in the Çukurova region. It has many subsidiaries from automotive to clothing, from gross market to multi-storey retail stores.

Gizerler is also a family-owned company, and the next generation of executives were well aware of the importance of the digital world in expanding these operations. They had a very important “know-how” with their experience in retail stores, being authorized dealers of many white goods brands and their investments in infrastructure..

For this reason, the inventory management of the e-commerce site they developed with in-house resources was integrated into the same ERP system as the retail stores. There was also the idea of separating e-commerce inventory management into a separate subset for the future.

We crossed paths with Gizerler as an extension of these efforts. They had gotten a comprehensive consultancy for the user experience (UX) and front-end design improvements of their e-commerce site. With e-commerce site becoming much more user-friendly and useful, the new goal was clear: Growing e-commerce volume.

After our on-site meeting in Adana, we continued to seek consensus through correspondence and online meetings. As a result of the dialog, we reached an agreement to carry out all 360-degree digital marketing activities, from the creation of the e-commerce site’s creatives to the execution of on-site SEO work in coordination with the in-house software team, from social media management to media planning and all other requirements.

As we quickly initiated our efforts, we primarily focused on improvements and developments on Gizerler.com. We focused on fixing the errors we identified in our on-site SEO analysis with the software development team and enriching the category and product content on the site.

In this process, we observed that the e-commerce site developed with .NET technology does not have a CMS to easily manage certain functions of the website and that a lot of information such as product descriptions pushed through the ERP, the product range on the site is determined by internal decision making processes and only limited options in certain categories of a very large product range in overall merchandising activities are reflected on the site.

We made mutual assessments on these issues within the framework of strategic consultancy. We tried to express the importance of investments to be made in order to get a share from a market structure dominated by large marketplace brands.

Of course, there is no obligation to use a .NET CMS on sites developed with .NET. However, in such a scenario, you need to allocate a serious software development resource and realize many integrations and/or operations directly by editing and developing code. This situation can be managed more easily in small-scaled e-commerce sites that appeal to a more niche audience. But for an e-commerce site on the scale of Gizerler.com, this also means the risk of missing many opportunities. You need to put much more effort in terms of rapid development requirements, reduction of margin of error and being flexible, integration of many marketing automation and reporting tools, etc.

Especially .NET-based headless CMSs provide many conveniences such as separating content and code, keeping content in separate silos and easily distributing it to different end points.

Of course, core business decisions such as technological infrastructure decision making and initial investment budgets are extremely critical. The license fees of .NET CMSs are quite high, and scenarios may arise where a tailor-made .NET CMS may be insufficient. In an alternative scenario, PHP-based e-commerce CMSs such as Adobe Commerce (Magento) and similar solutions can be considered. However, the investment here will also be quite large scaled.

In such large-scaled projects, planning needs to be done meticulously from the very beginning. The cost difference between the scenarios and the total cost analysis should be realized in detail together with a comprehensive needs analysis. If initial investments with a smaller scale are to be made at first, it is critical to plan for gradual growth in advance.

We have shared these issues and informed Gizerler that further investment requirements may occur in the future due to the current structure in case they would like to become a more dominant player in the industry.

In the ongoing process, we continuously resolved critical on-site SEO problems together with the software team, while continuing to develop product and category content.

While developing category and product contents, we have always maintained our approach of producing content with a value proposition and in line with the content strategy. For example, for the air conditioner category, we focused our content on how to choose an air conditioner and prepared a useful guide with many practical tips on this subject. We aimed to both guide users visiting the air conditioner category to choose the right product and to tap into users searching for this subject on Google.

Another task we realized regarding the site was to make the visual language more coherent. For the creatives used in banner areas, social media and on the site, we have created a design language that complements the brand language of Gizerler.com and where also written content and visual content complement each other. The e-newsletters, visuals and video animation content we created reflected the design trends of the day in a pleasant way.

As a result of the combination of the impact of the pandemics period with the on-site SEO studies and genuine content creation we carried out, we increased the organic traffic of the site by 70% in a short time and increased the average number of monthly visitors from 13,000 to 35,000.

As another integral part of the process, we prepared a comprehensive social media strategy booklet of nearly forty pages for Gizerler.com. Gizerler.com’s social media communication at that time was focused solely on product and campaign posts.

Even when you consider it from a very basic point of view, one of the most important rules we should not forget about social media management is to take the Pareto principle as a basis. 80% of your posts and content should be content that attracts and connects with your target audience and provides solutions to their needs. The ratio of posts about products and services should not exceed 20% in the ideal scenario.

In the strategy we prepared for Gizerler.com the targets set were as below:

• Increasing brand awareness,
• Creating a community that follows, recommends, comments about and reshares the Gizerler brand with pleasure,
• Creating a loyal and recurring customer base in this direction,
• Creating a colorful, fun, enjoyable content universe and of course
• Increasing site traffic and turnover volume

We defined the target audience, their demographic distribution, consumption habits and expectations in their relationship with brands in line with the retrospective Google Analytics and purchasing data we have gathered from Gizerler.

In this framework, we identified the 500 product-based keywords with the highest search volume in the keyword research we conducted by taking into account Gizerler.com’s product range.

Likewise, in competitor analysis, we examined companies such as Hepsiburada, Media Markt, Teknosa, Karaca, Emsan Amazon, and determined their pros and cons, and shed light on the path to be followed for Gizerler.com.

As a result of all this data, we defined the tone of voice, the objectives that communication should pursue and transformed them into actionable suggestions and deepened them with concrete examples and detailed explanations.

For example, we identified our target audience as Generation X and Generation Y. One of the most important issues for millennials is “trust”. Millennials, who attach importance to transparency and trust due to the ease of access to and dissemination of information, tend to make choices based on the references of people they know. Therefore, instead of selling to millennials, it is necessary to establish a trust-based relationship with them. It is important to establish fast and timely communication, to deliver the right message at the right time, to emphasize innovative product features, to offer a supported social purpose, and to affirm their personal identity.

In order to respond to these expectations of Generation Y, we defined one of the communication topics we recommended as “Interaction + Empowerment + Education = Trust.” Under this heading, we stated that content should be shared that interacts with followers and delivers power to them; content that explains the benefits of products, their contribution to daily life, the value they add to family life, and content should be produced to establish a relationship of trust with the community.

When we added Gizerler.com’s product range to this equation, we came up with the title “Against Wasting”. By adopting this title as a goal to prevent wastage, which also adopts the approach of social responsibility and being sensitive to the world and our environment that Generation Y attaches importance to, we planned to produce regular content about it. We developed an exemplary blog post and social media posts based on it, including a wide range of solutions to prevent leftover bread from turning into waste.

By creating many such communication topics, actionable suggestions and content examples, we have delivered the key to establishing a very comprehensive communication universe.

Of course, while all these works were progressing, the pandemic and pandemic-related measures gained more and more weight and became the center of all our lives. The conditions brought by the pandemic opened the door to a different era for e-commerce.

We will continue in the second part of our article about what this means for the Gizerler brand and us, who supported their development in this process.