Globe and Mail creates brand message to promote personal finance content
Ideas Blog | 08 August 2023
Nobody cares more about your personal finances than you do.
This was the consumer insight that provided the springboard for The Globe and Mail’s Invest in You campaign to promote our business, investing and personal finance content, and attract and engage digital readers.
It also allowed us to position The Globe, a premium-priced pay-walled product, as an investment in oneself that would pay dividends.
The eight-week campaign launched in October 2022. During the campaign, unique visitors to business and investing grew 32%, and pageview consumption increased by 21%. Unique visitors to our personal finance section increased by 58%, and over 52,000 unique visitors engaged with the new financial calculators.
The message and the media
The Globe has long been a leading source of business and investing news in Canada for business leaders.
However, we wanted all Canadians, particularly those at an earlier stage of their career and financial journey, to know The Globe offered a wealth of practical personal finance information, along with valuable tools and calculators to help them make critical financial decisions.
Working with our creative agency Naked Creative, and Polyester Studio, an imagination company specialising in character-driven animation, we put the reader at the heart of our brand story as they confidently tackled common financial challenges such as buying a home, making a career pivot, and managing their money.
Wrapped in our brand colours with original music, the result was a modern, high-energy, ownable spot that could easily be converted from video to print, digital, podcast advertising, and OOH creative.
The media buy focused on city centres and commuters to capture our target audience as they were returning to the office and perhaps considering their financial choices.
In-car posters on commuter trains directed readers with dwell time to articles via QR codes. Podcast advertising and digital video in office-building elevators provided contextually relevant environments.
To allow non-subscribers to sample our high-value content, we lifted our paywall for readers coming from programmatic ads as well as search and social ads, and leveraged national speciality TV, CTV, and OLV/broadcast pre-roll to drive mass awareness.
Informed by research
But the brand creative and media mix was only half the story. The success of the Invest in You campaign can be attributed to data and research.
Through Sophi, The Globe’s proprietary analytics platform, we have learned a lot about the customer journey: how readers come to globeandmail.com, how often, what content draws them in, what articles they’re willing to pay for either in dollars or personal information, and what our paying subscribers read.
A marketing attribution model helped identify the role different marketing channels played in our efforts to drive visits, pageviews, free registrations, and subscriptions.
These learnings, coupled with data from Environics about how to reach and speak to our target market, and a commissioned study by Ipsos Research, gave us a clear path forward for editorial, digital product development, audience growth, and UX.
Cross-departmental collaboration
In the lead-up to the launch of the fall campaign, we made several changes to globeandmail.com and our digital product offering.
Editorial expanded our personal finance coverage, adding new reporters and features to cover topics impacting our target market, while a series of explainers covering investing basics such as ETFs 101, how to choose between a TFSA, RRSP or RESP or how to find your credit score was created with SEO in mind.
We then elevated this content in search results through Google Adwords to capture readers with high intent and extended the reach of our content beyond our existing followers through paid social.
The digital product team also made a number of UX changes to make our site stickier and drive engagement.
New tools and calculators were added to article pages so, for example, after reading an article on interest rates, readers could access a calculator to see the impact on their mortgage or loan.
Personal Finance was moved from investing to the top-level navigation menu, and a “Go Deeper” expandable tab directed readers to further reading on a particular topic.