How Soldo’s strategic campaign boosted brand awareness by 58%

1. Low Awareness. Soldo's unprompted brand awareness was only 8%. Three competing brands were identified with similar expense management solutions (Spendesk, Payhawk & Pleo). All had significantly larger marketing spends than Soldo, and much greater unprompted awareness.
2. Category Inertia. The biggest competitor for all brands within the category was inertia — finance team’s reluctance to move away from the traditional employee expense rigmarole and managing company credit cards. Finance had become comfortable with the uncomfortable. Managing painful month-end reconciliations and an acceptance of the lack of real-time visibility across decentralized company spend.
3. Product underutilization. Where Soldo had been adopted into business spending rosters, it was under-utilized. Soldo was perceived as a convenient, tactical/emergency card to access company funds, rather than as a strategic platform to manage all of an organization's decentralized spend.
4. Lack of emotional engagement. There was a very functional take-it-or-leave-it perception of Soldo, both internally and externally, with low emotional connection to the brand, little perception of its mission, and scant indication that customers would recommend the brand to others.

The audience insight:

Soldo’s audience is every business employee who spends company money. But we took the strategic and economic decision to just target the actual buyers who sit in Finance (Manager, Director/Head of, VP/Exec, C-Level) and Procurement (Director of Strategic Sourcing, Head of Procurement, Procurement Lead) in organizations with 100-2000 employees.

Many finance professionals revel in the control they have of the purse strings, and the hoops employees must jump through to spend company money. We had to convince them that Soldo only enables freedom, because of its granular controls. You could be seen as a progressive financial enabler, while still having control and greater visibility of decentralized spending than ever before. Win, win.

Objectives & Strategy:

1. Drive brand awareness and educate through demand generation — ‘Liberate Finance. Accomplish more.’
2. Tackle category inertia — 'Progressive Finance'

Messaging & Creative:

The demand generation programme was the core activation to express Soldo’s brand repositioning: ‘Liberate finance. Accomplish more.’ A four-word promise that combined the customer and emotional benefits of the Soldo platform, anchoring and defining the demand generation ‘Journey to accomplishment’.

Each content journey started with pre-tested messaging drivers, directing finance and procurement audiences to educational content pieces which linked together to form the ‘Journey to accomplishment’. Email sequences were then triggered to nudge prospects forwards in their research into spend management and the benefits Soldo can deliver.

This TOFU suite of messaging was accompanied visually by Soldo’s newly created brand asset – the hummingbird. It adorned every Soldo Demand Gen asset, ensuring audiences had repeated exposure to Soldo’s branding, growing awareness not only for the 5% of buyers in market but also the 95% of potential future buyers. All TOFU Demand Gen assets (drivers and asset covers) had three core visual components that underpinned the specific messaging:

• The Soldo hummingbird, a symbol of liberation, precision and industry
• The ‘new dawn in spend management’ gradient heralding Soldo’s challenger status
• Metaphorical imagery that depicted the traditional ‘status quo’ that Soldo enhances

This imagery all came together to tell the Soldo story in the brand film which was re-edited regularly throughout the year with different demand generation call-to-action endings, to lead new prospects into relevant, tailored content programmes.

Once prospects elected to discover more about Soldo, the metaphorical visual approach was then complemented by contextual photographic imagery for MOFU/BOFU content, grounding Soldo in real-world business contexts or specific verticals like the care sector and manufacturing where relevant.

These business contexts and use cases were supported by relevant Soldo customer case studies and testimonials. According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, 84% of B2B decision-makers start the buying process with a referral. One of the core aims was to improve Soldo’s Net Promoter Score, by establishing a greater emotional connection with the audience beyond simple awareness, to create a brand people would feel confident to both use and recommend.

Another deliberate content and messaging tactic was to tell the Soldo story where possible in numbers. Numbers are the language of the audiences we were targeting so ‘Soldo in stats’ became a theme across the ‘Liberate finance. Accomplish more’ content programme alongside the narrative storytelling.

Media & Channels:

All paid, owned, and earned media channels fed into the demand generation programme. Content and messaging were tailored by persona, vertical, and buying stage with dynamic content on landing pages and email sequences. Nothing, including the ‘brand’ animation, went into market without a call-to-action into the content programmes. Media and channels were selected to most efficiently drive reach and frequency to our target audiences. The campaign was continuously optimized (subject lines, messaging, CTAs, formats, channels, content audits to refresh/retire assets, feedback loop from sales to improve message-market fit).

Brand-to-demand generation drivers: Social & display media: 70” brand animation | 15” hummingbird animations | Display banners | Static ads

Demand generation drivers: Email | Content Syndication | Social & display media | Events: Webinars, roundtables, tradeshows, Soldo-owned events | 3rd party publishers

Demand generation content: Dummies Guide | eBook | Perspective Paper | Infographics | Listicles | Business case builder | Case studies | Blogs | ROI tool | Datasheets | Webinar | Animations | Podcasts

The Results:

Performance was tracked by engagement, conversion, and pipeline, not vanity metrics. Over twelve months, demand generation activity yielded a 252% increase in pipeline with 90% net new prospects. Prompted brand awareness was up 625% from 8% to 58% (Brand tracking survey). Category-leading NPS scores up by 36%, with detractors down 13%. (Brand sentiment survey) 104% YoY increase in branded search (Google). Proof that tailored financial service demand generation programmes wrapped in distinctive branding can help drive brand awareness, change brand perception, and increase the likelihood of referrals.

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