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Making your brand heard above the noise and jostling of (often larger) financial services competitors is a major challenge. Here’s one recipe that’s delivered success for our clients in the consumer space.
What is the secret to delivering great consumer results for challenger players in the financial services industry? It all starts with a good dose of creative, a generous cup of strategic planning, an even sprinkling of data and a few dashes of consumer insight.
Mix this well with a good understanding of media targets and a nose for what will make ‘news’ and finish off with some execution discipline. What do we call this dish? An award-winning, results-laden PR campaign!
To demonstrate the point, let’s take a look at RaboDirect. We think it is a great example of how one (or in fact a few) sound creative ideas built around a great premise can give rise to an ongoing campaign that’s the very opposite of a ‘flash in the pan’.
RaboDirect is an online bank (and yes, a client – that’s how we know this story). It offers low fees and generally higher interest rates for an online only service. It is seen as Australia’s savings champion – an alternative to the Big Four.
Our brief: to help it stand out from the crowd and have its very solid bona fides noticed by its target audience. To do this, we needed to create a long-running campaign that could deliver consumer media results and raise the profile of this bank as a challenger brand.
To help demonstrate RaboDirect’s role as a savings champion, in 2010 the idea of commissioning annual research into the debt and savings behaviour of the nation – our client’s heartland of advocacy and concern – was hatched. The results of the research are published in what’s known as the National Savings and Debt Barometer (NSDB) – and it provides some very interesting insights.
In conjunction with BlueChip, RaboDirect took the research (let’s call this the ‘data and consumer insight’) and from it, identified a number of different creative story angles that we could run as mini ‘campaigns’ over an extended period of time. In this case, our key channel was the media, but we also used social media channels and online sites. The principle remains the same whatever channel you choose.
We used the consumer insights to develop stories that illuminated the core debt/savings related themes for different generations. This enabled RaboDirect to speak directly to each of its different target audiences about the issues that were most relevant to them.
The next step was to use the research findings to create other quality content, such as summary reports for each of the three generations including practical tips and suggestions for those struggling with their finances. The aim of these pieces was to offer solutions to the problems identified through the research. These were housed online to aid with SEO and to ensure that RaboDirect was visible when its target market searched for key topics online.
Ultimately, we created an overarching strategy around the research, including a multi-platform program to drive the longevity of the results of the NSDB across key communication channels. That included a story bank of 12 individual feature pieces targeting specific outlets, which were rolled out over a period of months
RaboDirect’s research showed that its brand awareness increased, while extensive media coverage relayed messages that resonated with its audiences, in effect another significant demonstration that RaboDirect is Australia’s savings champion.
Significantly, the campaign activity and the material that we produced for it was rated by the target audience as helpful and useful, as it featured practical tips and suggestions rather than ‘turn-off’ sales messages. This was squarely in line with RaboDirect’s goal of helping Australians take control of their savings.
But don’t just take our word for it. Based on the results – a total of 225 pieces of coverage with a potential reach of 52,651,276 – the judges of the SABRE 2012 Awards, awarded this campaign as the Financial Communication Gold Winner.
Stay tuned for more recipes to help you devise create campaigns that help your organisation’s voice be heard in the noisy consumer crowd.
