Brief
Our client is an innovative provider of payment technology solutions for financial institutions. Well known among European banks, early in 2023 the company was keen to connect with US-based banks that were focusing on implementing faster payment technologies, as required by the US Federal Reserve.
Reaching senior decision-makers at banks through traditional marketing is expensive and comes with with no guarantees. With this in mind, the client approached OST to help devise a smarter campaign using the power of LinkedIn, great content and a tactical advertising budget. The objective was to generate leads and also drive awareness of the brand in the US.
Approach
We know you can’t run a B2B lead generation campaign without first priming your brand awareness. By editing existing client content, combined with new footage, we created a suite of compelling introductory videos. Then, over 8 weeks, our Advertising Specialists used LinkedIn to target these at an audience of US-based senior banking professionals.
For the lead generation phase, we first worked with our client to identify a topic that would grab the attention of our target audience. Testing strategies are really important when you’re implementing real-time payments (take it from us!), so our topic became: Rethinking Testing Strategies for Real-time Payments. Our client provided two recognised industry experts, including an internal subject-matter expert, to share their expertise on the subject.
To generate leads, OST recommended running a live event on the client’s LinkedIn Company page. Although LinkedIn Live’s are a popular marketing tactic, we know from experience that niche topics can drive really strong results. We created the event page and ran a five-week programme of organic and paid promotion via LinkedIn, including speaker videos, announcement posts and teasers, re-targeting our engaged awareness audience.
For the day of the LinkedIn Live, OST sent the speakers a home studio kit to ensure the quality of the livestream. We managed and recorded the live event, running pre and post-roll videos, to ensure a high-quality, TV-like experience.
Results
Our efforts paid off. The lead generation campaign was a major success, attracting nearly 200 registrations from nearly 1,000 visits to the event page. This led to a significant number of lead opportunities. The brand awareness outcomes were arguably even more successful. By repeatedly reaching 20,000 senior bankers with our messaging (an average of 8 times each) the campaign was credited by the CMO with driving brand recognition among delegates at a major US banking event.