Situation
BlackRock wanted to raise awareness of their brand, increasing share of voice amongst a highly niche UK investment audience, whilst delivering incremental traffic growth to their site from in-market prospects. They wanted to position themselves as a thought-leader in the world of high-tech and ever-evolving non-traditional investment possibilities. A native branding and re-targeting programmatic campaign was suggested to reach the niche target market and a editorial and content plan put in place to create the thought-leader and expert positioning the brand wanted to achieve.
Solution
By using a combination of programmatic prospecting and retargeting activity and rigorous A/B testing of copy, Green Park Content distributed a series of thought leadership articles with eye-catching headlines, relating to UK and Pan-European societal and financial issues on contextually relevant news and finance sites. Not wanting to jump to any preconceptions about their audience, BlackRock were keen to start broad with targeting and narrow as the campaign progressed. To narrow the audience down we explored the testing of devices, environments, regions within the UK and specific publisher whitelists to garner more insight into the BlackRock prospect, and how we could grow and understand them moving forwards. We employed a CPC bidding strategy throughout the campaign to maximise the budget and minimise wastage. Optimisations were undertaken daily focused on streamlining delivery to the best performing creative iterations; adapting sitelists, publishers and domains to focus on those gaining the best performance. Running over 60 creative asset, headline and description combinations allowed us to employ our ‘test and learn’ methodology; finally ending up with the best performing images against the most powerful headlines.
Results
- Reduced the Cost per Click by 18%
- Identified breakout audience groups and behaviours that were previously undiscovered to BlackRock, namely a ‘conscientious early adopter’ audience; forward-thinking professionals who were looking to the trends and concerns of the future.
- De-risked future creative decisions by fine-tuning and customising content to appeal to the newly identified audience
- Unearthed a rich seam of new local news publishers that generated valuable data and leads whilst reducing acquisition spend
- Identified important patterns around dayparting and delivery
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