Federal Budget Hub

Objectives

Despite lending more to Australian businesses than any other bank (44% of its cash earnings), NAB found corporate customers often struggled to differentiate between the ‘Big 4’ banks. The objective was to address the gap between perception and reality, to grow and retain business banking revenue. The opportunity to cement NAB’s #1 position as the bank that understands business would be the release of the Federal Budget in May 2014. The challenge was a small window of opportunity to get cut-through and to take a dominant position in the conversation, to deliver 25,000 unique visits to the NAB Federal Budget Hub.

Campaign

Mindshare’s strategy was for NAB to lead the conversation and behave like an economic commentator, be the voice for business on the outcomes for the Budget in real-time. While most banking strategies are built on share of voice, NAB’s was set on speed of voice, using the online NAB Federal Budget

Hub. Mindshare used NAB’s social and data room to tap into live trends and focus commentary on the hottest topics. A team locked themselves in for 12 hours, covering social, legal, media, copywriting and content creation, responding live to social media commentary. Twitter trends were informed creative messaging, with dynamic real-time ads aligned to key topics from the Budget as it was presented. This was served across key business sites and social media to lead consumers to the hub.

Results

Using a budget of $79,000, down from $253,000, there were 35,956 unique visitors driven to the site in 24 hours (+44% vs target and +18% YOY). NAB achieved 37.9% of social media voice across the day, mainly and was the only non-publisher in the top five sites which received Budget-related search traffic. The bank was also in the top 10 highest engagement posts for LinkedIn Australia during Budget week and the only bank to make the list. Paid media metrics improved considerably, with clickthrough rates exceeding benchmarks by 150%.

Judges Comments

The NAB’s approach in this campaign was very different to how the category generally behaves. The judges really liked the ‘real time’ marketing and therefore agility of the campaign. A genuine media concept, utilising plenty of owned and earned media, which brought excitement back into business banking.