THE CHALLENGE

Tide is a business banking platform, on a mission to alleviate the struggles of small businesses by making finances simple.

Having launched and grown its initial customer base in London, Tide was keen to reach exciting businesses from across the UK that could benefit from its current and savings accounts, and new card reader.

​THE PROCESS

Our team was asked to develop a campaign to drive new account openings. It’s hard to get people to switch bank accounts, so we knew it was important to reach founders who had recently launched and likely hadn’t opened a business bank account yet. 

Tide also wanted to promote its new card reader, which led us to conclude our ideal target audience was new retail businesses.

During the six-month Pop Up with Tide campaign, businesses who opened a new Tide account had the opportunity to get free business advice, win a place at the pop-up event in Bristol and potentially receive a £5,000 grant.

The event gave our community an opportunity to grow their businesses and allowed us to create content promoting the partnership, like the event summary Reel.

Only verified Tide account openings would qualify, ensuring Tide would get a demonstrable return on investment from the project.

​POP-UP EVENT

Our experience of running small business events made us perfectly placed to include a pop-up event as part of our campaign for Tide.

Eight retailers who opened a new Tide account won the opportunity to set up their stalls for two days in Sparks, an independent department store in Bristol. The event also featured a Q&A session with the founders about their experiences as small business owners.

Tide had a stall at the event, meeting potential customers and helping them to open accounts. We worked with entrepreneur, investor and influencer Simon Squibb to add a pop-up doorbell to the space where people could pitch their dreams (watch Tom pitch Daily Discover Cards for families). 

Creating flyers, posters and branded cupcakes also encouraged people in the area to visit retailers.

​Creating a mini-brand to stand out

The campaign was supported by a programme of digital marketing activity. We created a sub-brand and accompanying assets to promote the partnership and stand out on social media.

On our own channels, we made sure to keep generating Pop Up with Tide content that involved the audience and reached new people.

To expand the reach of the campaign beyond our immediate community, we tapped into our Pitch alumni to amplify the campaign messaging, having had success with similar user-generated content on previous client campaigns.

We also researched for micro-influencers who would resonate with Tide’s target market, allowing us to amplify the reach of the campaign. 

We used a series of social media trends and trialled our own engaging ideas to cut through the noise of easy scrolling and capture viewer interest. We achieved 105% of our original target for organic video views across Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.

​Engaging audiences over email

Using learnings from our previous successes with email marketing to our communities and for clients, we put together a unique campaign for Tide that we knew would not only entice the audience to learn more about the campaign and Tide’s offering, but also drive application numbers. 

The emails maintained bright and engaging designs with personalised messages, and a call to action to apply in every email. This allowed us to achieve an average open rate of 55% across the campaign and the Pop Up with Tide event invitation was one of the most popular messages we sent this year.

Campaign results

Combining digital and in-person marketing allowed us to target specific startup demographics and create multiple touch points.

We had already surpassed the agreed targets for video views, competition applications and account openings with two months left on the campaign – and we beat Tide’s target Cost Per Acquisition target for new account openings.

We’ve also been able to follow the stories of some amazing founders who’ve directly benefited from the support, having a real impact on the people who took part and creating brand advocates for Tide.

“The Pitch team ran a really engaging campaign. They reacted to our feedback and the performance of different types of activity, constantly tweaking the approach so that we achieved our goals – and I love supporting business owners from their community.”

– Giulia Saletto, Head of Performance Marketing & Growth at Tide