EDF - Brilliant Noise

Award-winning integrated influencer marketing and SEO

The story

As an energy provider, it’s difficult to differentiate your brand. The sector has been disrupted by some of the fastest-growing companies in the UK, and it’s hard to get customers engaged.

We helped EDF navigate this with a combination of content, SEO and influencer programmes by maintaining one thing: a relentlessly customer-first and data-led approach to their marketing.

What was at stake?

EDF is under pressure in a radically disrupted industry. Smaller suppliers are rising up and creating an existential challenge to the large suppliers dominance. Large suppliers are bleeding customers, leading to frequent business closure.

Price comparison websites are eating into sales leading to a race to the bottom in terms of price. However, competing with the aggregators via paid search activity is prohibitively expensive.

EDF can no longer rely on existing customer loyalty; the brand needed a new way to reach out to customers.

Our work

We worked as an extension of EDF’s team, with an integrated approach to content, SEO and influencer marketing; with our strategy rooted in three main principles:

  • Relentlessly customer-first
  • Creative passion and technical excellence
  • Re-inventing team capability

To create impactful content that covered all customer needs at every level of the customer journey we used a hero, hub, hygiene model. We created customer first, data-led content that new and existing customers needed and wanted.

Delivering hero content – like our Electric Adventures campaign – meant we were able to reach new and existing customers with creative, compelling and intriguing content.

For hub and hygiene content, our work meant the brand have a natural yet dominant voice, and EDF are more visible across search engines for maximum impressions, sessions and conversions.

We changed the approach to content at EDF with this strategy:

  • By embedding research and customer insights into the content production process
  • Weaving creative stories into content
  • Ensuring content performance is measured and insights fed back into production

Technical search engine optimisation involves analysing the technical health of a website using a variety of tools. For EDF we started with the basics, ensuring that metadata, headings, URLs, re-directs and fixed broken links were all sorted.

We created a dashboard tool which enabled us to track historic tech changes, meaning that all optimisations we put in place and tracked over time. This helped with an increase in website performance attribution, assisting in achieving the EDF marketing team’s KPIs.

We worked with EDF development stakeholders to provide recommendations for website optimisation and led developments in key areas such as site speed, schema and page duplication.

To increase brand perception, social proof, build back-links and increase awareness for the brand, we built created an influencer strategy for EDF.

We designed and centrally managed an influencer programme for the brand, developing hero and hub level influencer campaigns that supported the brand’s content strategy. We assessed the suitability of influencers by using analytic programs about their channels, and analysed their audience data to make sure they had audiences we wanted to reach through their sponsored content.

The hero campaign for 2019 – Electric Adventures – is an influencer-led film series about UK road trips in electric cars. It features some of the UK’s biggest names in digital influence like Jim Chapman, The Michalaks and Mother Pukka.

The nine influencers we worked with on the Electric Adventures campaign have a combined total reach of 20.6 Million across all their channels. This allowed us to reach new and existing audiences with exciting and engaging content about the brand’s new electric car offering.

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