Famed for its ‘people-people banking’ ethos, Metro Bank is putting its own colleagues front and centre in its new hyper local marketing campaigns launching on Tuesday April 19th in Clapham, Cardiff, Kingston, Manchester and Oxford.
The campaigns promote the key services and difference Metro Bank offers its customers and who better to convey that message, than the very colleagues who deliver the services that make the difference. This new approach is based on using data and insight to drive both commercial efficiencies and deep insight about consumer needs, in a test and learn environment at just a handful of the Bank’s 79 stores.
Central to the campaign creative is the use of genuine Metro Bank colleagues who auditioned, from across the business, to star in the campaigns. These colleagues will feature on social media singing and dancing along to a famous ABBA tune with the words altered to publicise Metro Bank’s key differences. ABBA’s Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! has been transformed to Gimme, gimme, gimme a bank on a Sunday; We’re the local store that will be open for you.
Working with three of its agency partners, Metro Bank used deep consumer insight gathered from customer profiling and segmentation to choose its optimum target audience: ‘Rising Mets’ - essentially young professionals with very active lifestyles, meaning that their banking usually gets sorted on Sunday.
“We believe our hyper local and hyper targeted approach will really resonate with potential customers in these local communities,” explains Jessica Myers, Brand & Marketing Director, Metro Bank. “The rich data and insight gathered from our brand equity study helped determine our timings, so we focused on the busiest parts of the day and weekends for our out-of-home and social media assets. We also tested direct response marketing – a first for Metro Bank. This 360-degree approach helped us create a seamless customer journey.”
The campaign destinations were chosen for their high Rising Mets populations as they also offer a number of touchpoints where each campaign could engage with them, driving significant value and volume, as well as the opportunity to showcase some of Metro Bank’s newer stores.
Metro Bank is a multi-award winning bank and has been named the top high street bank for overall service to its personal current account customers eight times in a row. The new campaigns will highlight the Bank’s extended opening hours compared with other banks on the high street, its seven days a week operation and instant access offering – customers can open an account and leave the bank with a printed debit or credit card all on the same day.
Each location will see a unique combination of activity including local billboards, door drops, street leafleting and digital performance media promoting key messages, in addition to organic and paid for social media. Campaign activity will focus entirely on the busiest parts of the week day (6am to 10am and 4pm to 8pm) as well as on weekends.
Myers: “Being at the heart of the community is fundamental to our operation and our colleagues reflect the values and diversity of their local communities. By making our colleagues stars of the show, we believe the campaigns will be able to drive through our key differences more effectively with local audiences.”