Finance How Yoco rebranded to become South Africa’s biggest payment solution provider using Storyblok

About Yoco

Yoco is the biggest payment solutions provider for small businesses in South Africa, with sights set on expansion into new markets and countries across the continent in the near future. Yoco’s primary target audience is small businesses and eCommerce shopfronts in need of a payment solution, with the main principles aimed at covering Yoco’s brand awareness, selling card machines, and promoting eCommerce payment solutions. Around 80% of Yoco’s merchants are first-time card acceptees, making it a clear need, alternative, and solution for the market’s appetite.

With banks making it hard for small business owners to get their hands on an easy-to-use payment solution, Yoco helps them navigate that space in the South African market by leveraging the benefits of their platform.

Choosing Storyblok and Yoco’s project

Yoco’s setup pre-2019 relied on a bespoke website that was entirely built with Gatsby and purely native pages. With Yoco’s fast-growing expansion into new clientele and audiences, they needed a CMS that could withstand their needs and demands. Such requirements included allowing their developers to be able to use their tech-stack rather than having to learn a completely new one and with the right technical features available. Consequently, Storyblok allowed their marketing and design teams to fully use and immerse themselves in Yoco’s content and complete creative control without the need of a developer’s help.

Through Yoco’s search, they conducted POCs (Proof of Concepts) with various CMS solutions before ultimately settling with Storyblok as their CMS of choice. Within Yoco’s onboarding and implementation process, they collaborated with a tech agency that helped them design and build their website as a combined effort with Yoco’s product, growth marketing, design, and engineering teams. Storyblok facilitated a website that met the commercial and technical requirements for a market leader in South African fintech.

The Results

In the absence of a dedicated website manager, Daniel Fabre, Digital Marketing Manager, picked up management of Yoco’s website in October 2019. There was a need to make changes and updates to the site’s content, copy, and price changes over Black Friday in 2019. At this time, the company was working on a total brand refresh behind the scenes. In May 2020, Daniel led the rebuild of Yoco’s website using a Storyblok setup that showcased the company’s new look and feel, where the main website landing page and overall branding propelled Yoco further into the South African market.

Gaining Marketer independence

Having previously tried Wix, Shopify, and WordPress, Daniel’s satisfaction with Storyblok and leading Yoco’s rebranding process was streamlined through the flexibility and ease of use from a non-technical standpoint that pushed Yoco’s new website beyond limits. The Growth Marketing team at Yoco, being mainly non-technical, yielded the power to make changes whenever and wherever they wanted easily, integrating with all kinds of third-party platforms such as tracking, analytics, or AB testing. With that kind of flexibility that Storyblok provided in having the ability to create a custom-build according to the team’s needs while also retaining the simplicity of a drag and drop model was one of the key drivers that contributed to Yoco’s decision to further devote to a content management system like Storyblok.

Yoco’s rebranding

Yoco’s previous site around 2018 to early 2019 was considered ‘vanilla,’ in that the brand felt that it was trying to fit in with the market of other payment providers. After a series of observations, the team at Yoco realized that to appeal to the marketplace they were present in that was already skeptical of anything that looked like a bank or large foreign institution, they would need to coincide their rebuilt with their rebranding. Taking a second look at their once primary baby blue color palette that was awash already in the financial market of ‘blue-branding-adopters’ meant the team investigated and realized into adopting a much more South African secondary color palette, reserving the Yoco baby blue color for crucial moments of trust. Such moments in a customer’s journey are found in Yoco’s point-of-sale, the mobile application, or the ‘accept’ payment button.

Yoco wanted to resonate with their audience, making them feel represented and have a product that is specifically tailored to them. With the ease of use and flexibility of Storyblok, the marketing team at Yoco were able to easily A/B test (with VWO), prototype, reuse content and be agile around the intersection of aesthetics and performance that a content management system like Storyblok could provide and keep up with their optimization and rebranding. On top of that, for each test and trial the team conducted, they were able to easily translate data into content experiences for their audiences, hand-in-hand in continuously optimizing their site for the South African market, and to new sights into the future.

Another important factor within their rebranding resonated towards showing the simplicity and education of their product and services. One key factor Daniel and his team looked towards Storyblok was the ability to upkeep performance and handle rich media such as graphics and animations in short loading times.

Key Takeaways

Yoco were able to build a unique and complete rebrand of their organization while maintaining the ability for non-technical people to work directly within Storyblok freely without the need for developmental help. The team at Yoco were able to efficiently and effectively reutilize content types and components for their rebranding while having the ability to easily connect with third-party integrations allowed Yoco to stay on top of their marketplace while propelling them into their industry with Storyblok by their side.