Challenge
TrueLayer are Europe’s leading open banking platform with a very strong growth trajectory. TrueLayer came to ROAST at the beginning of 2021 with the following key business objectives of:
- Entering new markets globally with a European focus.
- Market penetration and growing market share became the primary objectives to establish a foothold ahead of competitors.
Campaign activation was therefore highly targeted to achieve this while maintaining the ability to service qualified leads driven by Google Ads.
Innovation
The strategy was to enter the larger European markets first to grow awareness and uptake within the industry, given the larger populations and economies combined with market research prior to launch, this provided a larger potential client base for TrueLayer’s expansion plans. Campaigns were rolled out across Germany, Spain and France as a priority to build traction in larger European markets, later followed by Sweden, Netherlands, and Ireland which were identified also as potential high value regions.
As Truelayer were looking to generate leads in new markets, with which they could take internally to nurture and grow into a client portfolio, a substantial part of our activity was aimed to drive leads. ROAST aimed to use a fully data driven approach and understand the user flow to conversion. Within our lead driving campaigns, we optimised beyond just a form submission, using integrated HubSpot data to drive valuable, qualified customers.
The foundations of the campaign were built from existing UK Google Search campaigns, this provided the strongest opportunities to begin expansion into these new territories, while setting a performance baseline to incrementally build activity. Entering a new market can spark a high degree of competition with existing market leaders, therefore maintaining brand presence became the basis of the launch activity. By optimising towards Marketing Qualified Leads across large parts of our activity, we ensured that we were driving leads that would lead to true business growth.
Our approach to reach these objectives was supported in different areas by some of our own proprietary technology. ROAST has a custom Natural Language Processing tool to review competitor messaging in bulk, ranked against behavioural biases. These biases are built upon Google’s own study into the Messy Middle. This proprietary tech allows competitor ad research at scale, providing detail on where there are gaps in messaging that could help our client stand apart. It also provides opportunities to test what is the most common messaging being used by competitors, and if there are specific trends being used by others.
Results
For the lead generation campaigns, the blended target Cost per MQL has been achieved since activity was expanded in January 2022, and improved upon historical campaigns in 2021 which were driving these leads at a much higher cost.
Pure volume of leads is not a true reflection of performance, by gearing our campaigns to optimise towards MQL, we ensured we drove leads that would develop true business growth.
With a strong foundation in Google Ads we achieved 161% of total lead targets in Q1, and 113% of targets in Q2.