Lithys 2017: Post Office UK- Social Marketing Champion

Lithys 2017: Post Office UK- Social Marketing Champion

Our #SummerSorted campaign, which ran from June – September 2016, intended to build awareness of our Travel Money product, get more people to buy it, and improve brand sentiment to be successful with this social campaign.

 

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Company: Post Office UKLOGO.png

Entry submitted by: Darren Jones (Social Media & Audience Insight Manager)

Community/Social Channels:

http://www.facebook.com/postoffice

http://www.twitter.com/postofficemoney

Lithy category: Social Marketing Champion

 

As one of Europe’s largest retail networks with more than 11,600 branches, Post Office is the UK’s market leader in mails, the fastest growing provider of personal and business banking services, biggest bureau-de-change, and an important source of footfall and income for the more than 10,000 independent businesses that run their branches.

 

Goal and key strategies:  

Our #SummerSorted campaign, which ran from June – September 2016, intended to build awareness of our Travel Money product, get more people to buy it, and improve brand sentiment to be successful with this social campaign. It was an integrated effort and the first time we bench-marked a social campaign with Lithium Social Media Management.

 

The plan: 

In order to achieve the above goals and objectives of the campaign, we needed to create a campaign which was relevant to the different audiences we were targeting. This audience-first approach saw us looking at the interests of our competitors’ followers, and what type of content those audiences are engaging with on social.

 

Taking this information, we split our social strategy into four focus areas:

  1. Incentives (Involve & Grow): Encouraging people to share and engage with contests (e.g. Which branch did you buy your travel money from? One winning response chosen at random) and maximize organic reach on social channels.
  2. Moments (Start the Conversation): Sharing positive and uplifting content regarding summer travel (e.g. swimming, Wimbledon, vacations) and sharing common conversation starters, as well as grow permissions to discuss Travel Money with people on social.
  3. Products (Inform & Sell): Sharing information about Travel Money and funnel social users into online and in-branch sales.
  4. Monitor & Respond: Monitor target audiences and respond quickly at scale using Lithium Social Media Management. 

We created a real-time Lithium dashboard to monitor and optimize activity. We also looked at social performance by social channel – Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. 

 

We also used the Lithium Social Media Management alerts feature helped ensure that we didn’t let Customer Service slip during this busy campaign. The platform kept us well-informed and up-to-date on real-time service alerts, volume alerts, influencer alerts and publishing alerts. We were all moving so fast during the campaign so this helped ensure we engaged quickly and that every customer was attended to appropriately.

 

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The results: 

The campaign achieved the goals and objectives set out, with the most significant metric being that we increased subscribers 113% through the development of engaging content. We now have more subscribers (and more Facebook followers) than Yorkshire Building Society and Tesco Bank, which is important for growing our Financial Service credibility – edging us closer to be the leading financial service provider by 2020.

 

Furthermore, on Facebook, we had a very strong CTR of 1.77% compared to our 1% benchmark. On Twitter, the campaign generated over 120k engagements at an average engagement rate of 3.74%. As a comparison, the average engagement rate is 1.88% for the financial services industry in the UK on Twitter.

 

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Our activity contributed to more than 8,000 online sales, which we were able to track by installing Facebook and Twitter pixels on the checkout pages, which was largely driven by on-going testing and optimization of messaging and targeting. Lastly, we are so proud to have a 38-minute response time to questions, discussion and complaints across social media, exceeding the industry average of one hour – especially pleasing given we had 36,000 conversations taking place during the campaign period.

 

A few other metrics we are proud of include:

  • Campaign contributed (via incentives) to a shift of -1.3 to -0.7% brand affinity
  • Social share of voice for the brand increased from 28% to 45% as a result of the campaign
  • A 128% growth in customers engaging with us on Facebook Messenger

Lastly, #SummerSorted helped demonstrate brand authenticity and product. 

 

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Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIo1Ui_Stow