Phase 1: Discovery Sessions
Phase 2: Growth and scale
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THE PROJECT
Deko, the multi-lender and multi-product retail finance platform, when at a pivotal point when GoldSand Digital was appointed to deliver its consultancy product, Discovery Sessions, in the summer of 2020.
Recently acquired by NewDay, Deko was developing an exciting portfolio of products and had significant growth objectives in place to enable it to start dictating the direction of travel in the retail finance sector.
The question was, which direction to head in?
As a company, it knew where it wanted to end up but the challenge was establishing the best – and fastest – route to getting there. All current marketing activity had been put on pause and, Deko wanted to ensure it was marketing itself to its core audience in a way that matched its visions. For Deko, it was a clean slate – a dilemma of what to do and what the priorities were.
This was where GoldSand Digital was able to support.
PERIOD OF DISCOVERY
Richard Harrison, Chief Financial Officer at Deko, explained: “GoldSand Digital’s experience with other finance clients alongside their commitment to understanding how Deko operates and our newly formed product suite, during the Discovery Sessions, made them the obvious partner.”
Together, we embarked on a period of consultancy, where, across a series of virtual meetings, GoldSand Digital was able to investigate and explore processes and systems, uncovering gaps and seeking out opportunities.
This was a process that encouraged the business to take a step back, break down the building blocks and rebuild together from the foundations up. The outcome? A purely bespoke digital marketing strategy, based around what Deko wanted to achieve and when, and detailing the steps needed in priority order.
This was the roadmap that the business then implemented alongside GoldSand Digital – moving from consultancy to agency to now execute on the agreed strategy.
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DELIVERING ON THE STRATEGY
As a business, GoldSand Digital explored the product portfolio – the products Deko takes to market, how they were defined and, what role content had, if any, in marketing these and amplifying the core messages.
In addition to looking at products, audience and platforms, the GoldSand Digital team delved into planning schedules, automation, segmentation and demand. “We looked at behaviour flow, with 73% of traffic going to the Home page yet 69.5% of people leaving the website from there – and just 11% of users remaining on the website after two interactions,” explained Nick Golding, strategy lead.
There was huge potential to capture general “retail finance” search traffic. A strategy was required that would constantly reinforce Deko’s position as a thought leader in the market.
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GROWTH AND SCALE
The first 4-month foundation stage centred around getting results, fast, with the view to scale at a later date. Building the foundations for a successful marketing strategy involved highlighting areas to be fixed such as SEO optimisation and existing content, then building new strategies that would help Deko on their path to influence the direction of travel in retail finance, using tools like a bespoke Content Matrix.
Phase 2, Growth and Scale, involved exploring new formats for content and growing the profile of the brand. It looked at social media strategy, producing more creative content and building an organic following across social media channels.
Within these stages of work, GoldSand Digital interviewed merchant clients, worked closely with the product and BD team and designed a content plan that saw consistent production of engaging content published on the Deko website.
This gave the team more outbound communication options, while driving high quality traffic to the business.
As a result of the persistent, high quality content around certain topics and themes, Deko’s visibility score increased with high traffic terms reaching optimum Google positioning.
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THE RESULTS
Having designed and executed a content strategy for the business, we were in a position to start analysing the results and the traffic as a result. Alongside the creative, optimised and high-performing content we made significant adjustments to the website that helped it to get ranked for certain key phrases, this led to more than a 40% increase in year-on-year traffic and page 1 ranking for terms including, “retail finance”.
Across various other metrics listed below there were improvements. All of these are typical scores that show content is both attracting and engaging more customers via the website:
• Quality traffic (ie, potential clients) climbed 21%
• 8% more pages were read per session
• Avg. session duration increased by 23%
“We know that high value and engaging content is vitally important on our growth journey at Deko. If we are to truly influence the direction of travel in retail finance and hit the ambitious growth targets we have set ourselves, we must be constantly sharing, engaging and reaching out to our audience.”
Richard Harrison, Chief Financial Officer at Deko
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ABOUT US
As the content and conversion expert, we work with global and fast-growth brands in finance and technology to accelerate growth and transform performance through intelligent, trackable content and deeper customer engagement. We have spent over a decade consulting with leadership and marketing teams, building and executing strategies that deliver exceptional digital performance via high performing content. Our scientific approach to content and conversion is called Swarm, and if you’d like to find out more about how this works and how it could influence high value traffic and conversion for your business, get in touch with the GoldSand Digital team.
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