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As a global leader in CPG and retail products, Walmart Canada had no outlet to establish authority and customer education around their products and brands.

Content Marketing Case Study: Walmart Canada – theHub Ecommerce Content Strategy

Project Overview:

As Sr. Content Marketing Manager for the Walmart Canada e-commerce team, I was tasked with creating a world-class, integrated SEO-centric and e-commerce enabled content marketing hub for the organization.

In practice, I also had to prove the value proposition to executive stakeholders by integrating Walmart’s transactional ecommerce business designed to rank in search and build authority around the company’s many product verticals and channels.

Challenge:

As a global leader in CPG and retail products, Walmart Canada had no outlet to establish authority and customer education around their products and brands. They desperately needed a content marketing strategy and platform to put this stake in the ground and support SEO and performance marketing solutions for the brand, their partnered vendors, and merchants.

Solutions:

I built theHub platform completely custom in my preferred and prescribed WordPress. I hired and trained the editorial content team to worked tirelessly with the SEO team to ensure that technical and on-page SEO best practices were followed to the letter and with emerging trends in scope.

The big sell for the executive teams involved discovering custom product endpoints to build into the site, allowing us to pull real-time product data from Walmart’s corporate e-commerce site directly into articles and content features.

This created the needed hype for executive teams to satisfy that the content and educational experience could and would also be transactional and allow readers to purchase products or follow the buying cycle from article, to product page, through to completion, and into the purchase loop.

Outcomes:

  • Established a premier, custom, and completely integrated website and content hub in a little over 60 days.

  • Rigid SEO and content marketing best practices earned first-page and Top 10 ranks for all target keywords across hundreds of articles.

  • Custom product data endpoints and APIs allowed us to create transactional, in-article product shelves that updated based on the corporate site in real-time, leading to the customer purchasing loop.

  • The Hub went on to become an award-winning, authoritative national and global resource for product info, showcases, vendor highlights, and brand partnerships, still to this day.

Learns:

  • It is imperative to the success of product delivery to understand and prioritize the core needs of executive stakeholders. In this case, creating a transactional experience was the key to unlocking the go-ahead for creative and less visible best practices.

  • The only way to establish this much work in a very short period is absolute collaboration and synergy. This work was the product of the internal digital marketing team, editorial team, web publishers, technical, and content SEO team – all coordinated, hired, on-boarded, and led by myself.

  • It is essential to get design and brand standards locked in at the beginning of the project to mitigate more subjective internal negotiating mid to late project or at the last mile of delivery. Then, expect it to happen to a certain extent anyway.

Links and References:

*Sadly, after nearly a decade of success, Walmart Canada sunset theHUB program in 2023