2022 Winner

SilverBest in Data-Driven Marketing

BronzeBest in Location-Based Marketing

HSBC
"Punch Above the Weight"
Touché!
Amid the volatile real estate market, HSBC, as a performance-driven challenger brand, needed media to work three times as hard to achieve aggressive goals: acquire 24K new-to-bank mortgages, with 10% of those being high ratio mortgage; and increase qualified leads growth in marketing response.

Just when we thought the COVID-19 situation was recovering, the news of inflation hit Canadians. Amind inflation, the real estate market has experienced rising interest rates, frequent rates change and home prices sitting higher than ever. The latest data showed home sales sank 47.4 % year-over-year in July 2022, while sales activity was down 24.1% monthly.

Despite this uncertain market, there is a unique group of homebuyers who embrace the economic challenges with courage. They demand that their financial partners perform up to their standards with flexibility and offer them the most suitable solutions. These new homebuyers were the target.

Amid such an economic environment, in-market home shoppers instinctively want to go to a trusted source for their mortgage – primarily, their existing bank. Their problem: HSBC has less than a 2% share of banked Canadians.

To position itself at the heart and top of mind of new buyers’ process, HSBC designed a first-to-market solution using exclusive third-party data to build a direct line to live data. Its strategy took place in three steps:

How does it stand out among the aggressive competitors? It knows how heavy competition spends in the OOH medium. The traditional OOH strategy doesn't allow the flexibility to keep up with the market's volatility. It needed to outsmart the competition.

Seeing the outdoor traffic start to restore post-pandemic, it designed a DOOH solution infused with precise real estate listing data. The design intercepted the most fruitful moments of the home-buying journey when people are on their way to home-viewing.

How does it keep up with the Bank of Canada's frequent rate changes and deliver the flexibility their homebuyers seek? It designed a DCO solution that factors in rate changes and the plethora of mortgage options. Whether it's fixed, variable, cash bonuses or hybrid mortgages, HSBC has the right mix of solutions delivered in front of you just a couple of clicks away to learn more.

How does it meet the ambitious growth goal of the business? To win during uncertainty and serve the target audience, it must think and act like them with optimism, agility and collaboration. It put a rigorous performance review framework in place to optimize targeting signals, spending, creative and platforms against the marketing targets every other week, with multiple cross-functional
teams and partners.

Working with Boardsign for DOOH, it partnered with realtor.ca and MLS, Canada's largest real estate websites, to gain access to its feed in real-time to identify current home sale hotspots based on where there are lots of listings.

Before the campaign launch, it established a baseline listing to identify where the varying surplus of new home listings will be. It developed an algorithm where an HSBC mortgage ad would only trigger when a certain amount of new house listings were live in a small radius around each board proposing advantageous mortgage rates.

During the dynamic optimization of the DOOH design, it noticed how much the surplus of real estate listing changes each week, if not daily, reassuring it of the effectiveness of this first-to-market design infused with real estate data vs. a traditional OOH that can’t keep up with the market change.

This initiative was supported by an integrated media campaign, compounded with the programmatic DCO solution and rigorous biweekly optimization to achieve performance goals. Print, radio, TV and digital tactics drove users to an acquisition campaign in search, social and programmatic.

It developed its media surrounding these principles:

Get ahead: yielded first-to-market DOOH solution that outsmarts the competition in its
heavily-spend medium.

Responsiveness: The DCO solution is pivotal in responding to BoC and delivering a plethora of mortgage options, which also uncovered a demand that the competition has overlooked in terms of product/creative messaging.

Optimization: the rigorous optimization framework across targeting signals, spending, creatives and platforms against the marketing targets.

Campaign results have exceeded HSBC’s expectations, generating an increase of 70% of marketing responses against mortgages year over year (vs. the target of 27% growth). It also succeeded in acquiring the targeted new-to-bank mortgages, including the high ratio ones. Acquisition cost efficiency was 20% more efficient than the target. Branch locator use has increased by 187%, and Book Appointments triggers online were up by over 550%.

Despite the dip in the real estate market in April (~40% down in the housing market due to inflation and BoC rate increase), the organic search volume of HSBC mortgages experienced 56% less decline than the competition.

Credits

Touché!
HSBC
Hogarth
Broadsign Ads
Wunderman Thompson