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How a Bank Used Digital Media to Put People Back to Work, Increase Brand Awareness

Authors: Shannon Paul Shannon Paul
Posted Under: Digital Marketing
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badge-guest-post-FLATTERTwo years ago, Fifth Third Bank identified the reason that some of its customers were behind on their mortgage payments was due to job loss. For those less familiar with Fifth Third, we’re known as the Curious Bank, so we take pride in our ability to challenge ourselves to ask better questions to find better solutions.

Rather than focusing on late payments, we asked ourselves if there was a way we could help these customers get back to work. By helping them with the true root of the problem—joblessness—we knew we’d be able to help our customers stay in their homes.

So in 2012, Fifth Third established a first-of-its-kind relationship with NextJob, an online and one-on-one job coaching service, to help those in need. More recently, our team expanded the program even further, by harnessing the power of social media to help individual job seekers get back to work with our Retweet to Reemploy initiative.

Retweet to Reemploy was originally conceived as a second quarter marketing effort with our agency of record, Leo Burnett, to gain recognition for the bank’s reemployment program. The campaign included three major efforts: shareable content, a wide distribution strategy, and a strong call to action.

Make it Shareable

Every digital asset focused on garnering positive word of mouth throughout this campaign, including traditional digital banner ads that had a Retweet as the primary call-to-action. Digital banners proved not only a successful driver of site traffic and awareness, but a key driver of social sharing activity.

By the end of the campaign, we exceeded our share-rate goal by more than 35%.

We did this by focusing on the stories we had to share. Every asset we created focused on the individual job seeker stories, which were stories of those currently going through Fifth Third and NextJob’s one-on-one coaching program—what they were looking for in a job, what they were doing to get by. The result was heartening with many raw, often vulnerable moments. To do them justice, we created documentary-style videos that would let those real moments shine through, allowing the viewer to genuinely connect with the story.

Diversify Your Content Strategy

To tell our job seekers’ stories, we utilized the entire owned, paid, and earned media spectrum, keeping our primary performance indicator—shares—in mind.

  • A campaign-dedicated microsite, 53.com/reemploy, drew nearly 100,000 unique visitors and invited individuals to dig deeper into the personal stories of the campaign’s job seekers and tweet directly from the site.
  • Fifth Third’s social media streams – Twitter, primarily, but also LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube – focused heavily on campaign visuals and the Retweet to ReEmploy call to action message. Using such a simple and direct CTA proved positive as we surpassed our retweet goal with two weeks left in the campaign and as a result awarded 53 one-on-one job coaching scholarships to job seekers in need.
  • Targeted video buys also encouraged people to Retweet to ReEmploy, which generated the highest YouTube views to date for the Bank and exceeded Google’s view estimate.

While shares was our primary KPI, brand awareness and consideration, which the Bank carefully measures, helped form the direction of this campaign, and Public Relations was a major player in terms of providing credibility to Retweet to ReEmploy.

The public relations team focused on traditional and digital PR as well as influencer relations to amplify the campaign messaging. PR secured nearly 750 media placements in print, radio, online and TV. In addition, more than 100 online influencers helped spread the word about the campaign via social media.

This social-focused PR effort successfully contributed to the total Twitter and Facebook reach of more than 10.5 million. In addition, on the SEO front we have seen a lift in search demand for our branded keyword terms, an indicator of increased awareness among consumers doing online research.

The focus on brand awareness will be of importance in terms of how we measure the overall effectiveness of the campaign moving forward. While the campaign officially has ended, we hope the message will live on as we continue to build connection and engagement with longer-term prospects to drive future consideration. And we believe it will. Because at the end of the day Retweet to ReEmploy supports one of the Bank’s core beliefs:

Fifth Third can improve the lives of our customers and the communities we serve.

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