CMC Markets Group's "Master Your Market" campaign won gold in Search at The Drum Awards for Marketing APAC, reengineering demand by shifting focus from SEM to building brand awareness and intent long before users hit Google.
In early 2024, CMC Markets Group Singapore (CMC) stood at a crossroads. Despite its trusted legacy, macroeconomic turbulence, rising skepticism, and fierce competition left the brand vulnerable.
Retail traders were retreating: declining trading activity, new user stagnancy, a plateau in branded searches.
The Singapore leverage trading market was shrinking (Investment Trends 2024), and our new platform, CMC Invest (launched Q3 2023), lacked awareness. Rising ad costs hampered conversions.
Legacy tactics—optimizing low-funnel queries—no longer delivered.
Search wasn’t broken—but it was no longer enough.
SEM remained CMC’s most powerful tool for conversions. But to thrive, we needed to build the conditions for success BEFORE the query. That meant driving awareness, trust, and relevance—long before the user hit Google.
We flipped the funnel. SEM shouldn’t be the starting point—but the conversion endpoint of a broader ecosystem designed to ignite curiosity, build confidence, and trigger branded intent.
Enter MASTER YOUR MARKET: a campaign fusing storytelling, full-funnel content, responsive creative strategies, and sharply tuned SEM orchestration. We weren’t just optimizing search but ENGINEERING it to deliver holistic business impact by setting the stage for intent.
Launched in June 2024, the plan was simple: use social to foster interest, and rebuild our SEM infrastructure to capture high-intent traffic at the perfect moment.
Using CMC’s first-party data, we assigned values to various conversion actions, subsequently overhauling our conversion tracking approach on Google.
Tailored experiences were crafted across ad creative, bidding strategy, and landing experiences.
We structured our media mix around clear cross-platform roles and synergies. Championing our strategy was Google SEM, complemented by Apple Search Ads intercepting in-market investors at decision-making points.
Supporting our SEM core were Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit—each playing a unique role in building contextual relevance and driving audience-specific engagement to cultivate the upper to mid-funnel.
We launched two flagship brand campaigns—designed to emotionally resonate, culturally connect, and funnel demand into SEM conversion.
A cinematic celebration of risk, resilience, and calculated action.
We partnered with three trailblazers—chef Bjorn Shen, ultrarunner Natalie Dau, and actor-entrepreneur Darren Lim—each embodying the boldness to take calculated risks.
Hero creatives framed trading as a human, courageous pursuit. Each asset subtly guided viewers toward phrases like “CMC Markets” and “CFD trading platform Singapore”—embedding search intent within storytelling.
For long-term investors, we drew on the spirit of endurance.
We cast Shanti Pereira, Team Singapore Sprinter, as the face of investing with discipline. Her track-themed campaign emphasized focus, perseverance, and momentum—paralleling long-term wealth-building.
Her story drove queries around “investing for women,” “CMC Invest app,” and “how to start investing Singapore.” The creative laddered into SEM with RSAs optimized for relevant demographics and investment interest.
Markets don’t sleep, so neither did our content. Underpinning this, we rolled out an always-on social creative content strategy. From market insights and deep-dives with finance experts, to promo-driven creatives and interactive brand & KOL content, we fostered unceasing engagement.
We focused on relentlessly driving search interest in investing, market trends, and—most importantly—the CMC brand.
We completely rebuilt our SEM infrastructure across branded and non-branded campaigns—infused with dynamic intent signals and conversion-focused optimization.
We paired our SEM efforts with moment-centric creative deployment, reinforcing CMC’s presence when investors were searching most.
When launching “Master Your Market,” CMC wasn’t trying to outspend—it was fighting to stay relevant. In six months, we didn’t just stabilize—we turned SEM into our highest-performing and most powerful conversion engine.
To make SEM thrive, we knew we had to fuel it. And IT WORKED. Branded search volume took off with an immediate lift in conversions.
Even with ad volatility, our SEM campaigns delivered serious ROI. We were so efficient, we reduced ad spends while still smashing targets by 180%.
True performance isn’t just about acquisition, it’s about action. After months of stagnation, we reignited trading activity.
We’re swiftly closing the literacy gap on trading and investing among Singaporeans. Transforming cold audiences into confident action-takers—CMC’s SEM engine is a foundation for future growth.