About
From product push to interest pull: how can you drive your young clients interests into banking stuff?
Innovation presentation
Customer insight we started with.
Young adults, on the verge of living on their own, have little or no interest in financial matters that go with this big step. On top of this, they feel that most financial organisations don’t take them seriously because of their current low net income.
What motivates us?
We want to become a trusted source of inspiring information and be considered an expert guide who understands our younger customers. Therefore we opted to be present in their world, using a mobile first internet platform.
Inspiration did not come from our competitors.
Most of our Belgian competitors address this target group to sell products. Our hub-concept is new and no other bank in Belgium is doing this, certainly not as complete as our approach.
Departments involved
We apply the basic rules of content marketing. This implies an important shift in focus, attitude and budget not just from the communication department but from the whole marketing group: customer value proposition, campaign data management, product specialists, IT developers, channel managers and reporting experts.
How are we doing?
During these first weeks, the number of unique & returning visits is still fairly low but climbing, as traffic generation plan is deployed. (via eg. monthly newsletter, increasing presence in social media, …).
Other KPI’s like number of visited topics, use of deep links, time spent on the platform … are well above our targets.
Uniqueness of the project
'- This innovation is incremental, opting for this strategy was disruptive: from inside-out to outside-in: we take ‘real life questions’ from young adults as starting point - using multiple sources, such as interviews with them and google keywords
- and we answer those, using different formats (infographics, testimonials, ..). Testimonials are a very important format, because young adults love to share their experiences and read about experiences of others.
- Using the HUB in our communication strategy fits well with the company’s market approach based on “moments of truth” in our customers life cycle.
- Because of the specific approach we built new result measuring processes and tools, taking KPI’s such as page views, returning visits, time spent, etc. into account.
In-Depth Analysis
The Reason Behind
Target group related
- overall “boring” image of banks; little to no differentiation.
- growing importance of mobile usage by this target group
Marketing related
- danger of churn when moving from free products to paid ones in a segment of critical importance
- opportunity for selling a diverse product range
Communication related
- unserved needs of financial education
- identified need to be self-steering as a client
Results
'- The number of visits to the hub is currently growing as our traffic generation campaign is rolled out.
- Based on pre-test result, we decided to focus our editorial plan on topics most relevant to our users, which also allowed us to make a production cost reduction of 35% .
- Other qualitative results: increased interest within the marketing group which has led to a growing willingness to cooperate and integrate expert content in the site. This will allow us to provide higher quality content in the longer term.
- Some initial commercial results:
-> The youth focused prepaid credit card product is indexing 260 versus same month one year ago (also driven by halo-effect of summer campaign)
-> The uptake in bankcards within our Welcome Pack product (aimed at younger users) has seen an incremental sales growth of 12%
- Positive feedback based on pre-testing:
-> strong impact on attractiveness of the brand
-> increased interest in products related to topics discussed in the content hub (credit cards, car loan, saving account for a house, ..).
Innovation Info
- Country France
- Category Best New product or service 2016
- Keyword Corporate branding Kids-targeted offerings
Key Dates
- Launch date 15 October 2015
