The Background
Stickyeyes and Kroger have formed a long and successful partnership, with Stickyeyes supporting on a complete digital overhaul of some of Kroger’s key service areas. The result is that we have been able to deliver significant efficiency and growth through digital engagement, content and search marketing.
Stickyeyes’ work with Kroger has resulted in a much more consumer-centric brand for some of Kroger’s core services. We have supported Kroger in consolidating a wide range of brands into one digital strategy, building a robust digital infrastructure, improving organic and local visibility and developing enhancing the brand’s service propositions to deliver significant return on investment.
A complete digital transformation
Stickyeyes was initially engaged by Kroger to support with a complete digital transformation of its Money Services division, which provided bill-paying and cheque cashing services within Kroger grocery stores across the United States.
Whilst the business transacted with consumers on a purely face-to-face basis, Kroger knew that digital could be a key tool in growing that division of the business. By increasing the footfall into Money Services, we would also drive footfall into those grocery stores.
Our work would go on to completely realign how Kroger Money Services engaged with its consumers online, driving footfall into Kroger stores, taking advantage of key gaps in the market and having a transformative impact on the business.
Brand consolidation
Kroger’s financial services were previously provided through thirteen separate brands within the Kroger ‘Family of Stores’. Whilst these brands individually appeared in organic search for brand-related terms, Kroger was missing out huge amounts of potential, relevant traffic for more generic keyword terms.
We worked with the brand to streamline these brands into a singular Money Services brand that was focused on using digital to drive in-store footfall, to connect with consumers on key informational and commercial search queries, and to position Kroger Money Services as the solution.
Designing a new brand presence
As part of this strategy, we needed to create a completely new online presence for the 13 separate brands under one, new, Money Services brand.
We embarked on a full website development project that would deliver on that aim, whilst ensuring that the proposition remained instantly recognisable to the customers of each of the respective brands.
What followed was the design, development and launch a fully responsive site for the new Money Services brand, optimised for mobile and achieving a page speed that was faster than any of Kroger’s core competitors.
Building content depth and relevancy
Having established a new, consumer-centric brand for Kroger Money Services, we needed to build the authority and relevancy that would be crucial to delivering improvements in organic search visibility.
Having looked at the competition, we identified clear opportunities for Kroger to target search queries relating to specific billers or merchants. By focusing on these terms, we could deliver highly qualified traffic quickly, giving the brand a stronger platform to compete for those competitive generic terms in the long term.
The result of this analysis was the creation of more than 150 pieces of content focused on each merchant and biller, allowing Kroger to build authority and relevancy on terms relating to paying bills for specific providers.
Seasonality was also key in our considerations, with content deployed for specific periods where activity for certain transactions was high, such as the tax returns and tax refunds.
Optimising for local search
Whilst this was a digital project at heart, Kroger Money Services was still a “bricks and mortar” operations where transactions took place in store. That meant that we needed to ensure that consumers could not only find the brand online, but that they could find it offline as well.
We created detailed pages for more than 2,000 Kroger Money Services locations, with each page optimised for local search to help consumers find their nearest store offering the services that they were looking for.
Using Google My Business, we were then able to optimise the brand for ‘near me’ searches – a growing trend that we were able to capitalise on – to drive more than 130,000 attributable store visits.
Supporting organic growth with smarter paid and biddable strategies
Our efforts to deliver organic search performance were supported by a smarter approach to paid search and biddable media.
Using factors such as age and gender bid modifiers, time of day and key seasonality periods, and overlaying this with insight from AdWords and our own in-house tools, we were able to drive significant volumes of in-store visits at reduced cost-per-conversion.
A partnership that works
We have been impressed by Stickyeyes’ skills, talent and ability to partner with us on some of our most critical digital marketing, design and SEO efforts. As a partner, they have helped transform our digital presence and customer offerings over the last few years.
We want to ensure that our Money Services products stay at the cutting edge for our consumers, and that we continue to deliver the service that our valued customers expect in 2020 and beyond. We expect Stickyeyes to play a major role in that.
Gregg Cosco, Head of Digital, Kroger Money Services.
