How to use digital ad targeting in the real world
“Conventional wisdom says that real world ads can’t be as targeted as digital ones. We decided to challenge that.”
As a digital business, Azimo excels at attracting customers with targeted digital campaigns. Despite this, 90% of the remittance market remains offline, with customers paying punitive rates and fees, often unaware that faster, safer, better value services like Azimo even exist.
To reach these audiences, we knew we had to tell our story in the real world as well as the digital one. When we launched our most recent outdoor advertising campaign in London, we asked ourselves how we could best reach the migrant communities that need our remittance service most.
Online targeting in an offline world
London’s outdoor advertising market is vast and its audience possibly the most diverse in the world. In order to choose where to place our ads, we combined our detailed knowledge of our customers with UK census data to target our efforts to specific postcodes (and often to individual streets).
Although we have customers from all over the world, we chose to focus especially on Polish, Nigerian and Filipino communities in this campaign. By analysing our own customer data, we were able to avoid putting ads in areas where Azimo already had significant numbers of customers, further increasing efficiency.
Real people, real stories
Money transfer ads can be pretty generic, featuring models who could be from almost anywhere. We recruited models from the specific national communities that we were advertising to, making sure that the people, clothing and backdrops we chose would be relevant and resonant.
Given that the majority of our customers send money for family support, we created ads featuring different generations, from grandparents to young children. The scenarios we chose to reflect in the campaigns, such as sending money for driving lessons, school books or a birthday party, were drawn from interviews with real customers and their stories about how they use our service.
Speak the customer’s language… literally
Digital technology allows us easily to show ads to prospective customers in their own language. An outdoor ad, however, doesn’t know what language a passer-by speaks (at least not yet). After analysing census data, though, we were confident enough to run Polish-language ads in certain postcodes with especially dense Polish populations.
Some Londoners found these ads provocative, a sign of the renewed sensitivity about immigration in the wake of the Brexit vote. The feedback from the Polish community, however, was resoundingly positive.
The results
The results of the campaign were very positive, with a big jump in new customers from the postcodes that we targeted and a significant increase in searches for Azimo on Google.
There was a particularly large surge in new customers sending money to Nigeria. We ran special ads on bus routes specifically to be visible in Nigerian neighbourhoods in London. Several Nigerian customers contacted us during the campaign to say that they had never seen Nigerian people as the focus of UK ads in this way before. It was great to hear that.
Azimo is the fastest, safest and best-value way to send money anywhere in the world. We’re delighted to be bringing our service to a wider audience than ever before with our next outdoor campaign in spring 2018.
