Insight
The market of credit card dining offers in Hong Kong is extremely competitive. Offers are sometimes quite similar among the industry, programmes are likely to be more beneficial to merchants/bank rather than consumers, and the sources of insight for setting up the offers sometimes may not represent the majority of what consumers want.
The challenge is how to get the insights of what majority wants so that client can provide offers that are more relevant to what users want, how to engage the offers to users in their daily lives, and how to make the offers stand out in the market through the online platform.
Strategy
One of the focuses of the campaign is insight of the majority. So, as Yahoo Search is the search engine with the no.1 user reach in Hong Kong, it was confident that it could provide the related dining and travel insights by interpreting big data from its search engine.
This was the first campaign in Hong Kong where Yahoo partnered with a bank client by using its search data. Yahoo saw that Japanese Cuisine is the top search cuisine in the past three months, and provided this finding to HSBC, and then they lined up relevant and attractive offers of different Japanese Restaurant for their cardholders. This card programme was widely promoted through Yahoo portal in both display and search platform.
Execution
Since the offers are quite attractive, it could simply communicate and attract users through normal banners in its run-of channels. However, it believed that it could only create a short-term effect and it might not be able to sustain and engage users in daily lives.
Hence, Yahoo used content market elements to engage users in this campaign, e.g. Japanese Cuisine was the top search cuisine, so it integrated Japanese dinning related articles with HSBC dinning offers in Yahoo Topix – a channel which centralised all the lifestyle and dining content. Additionally, it created a brand new sponsored entry bar that exclusively ran on the Yahoo Hong Kong Homepage. It streamed the latest related article to engage users everyday they came to Yahoo Hong Kong, and it engaged users when they were looking for lifestyle content.
Results
Throughout the campaign, the media placement created tremendous public awareness through Yahoo’s online platform. It drew over 350,000,000 eyeballs per month. It greatly engaged users with lifestyle content in Yahoo Topix channel with an average 200,000 unique visitors per month. Most importantly, the campaign banner’s performance (CTR) significantly exceeded the average of industry benchmark by over 400% as a result of the relevant banner message matching with the relevant content.
The campaign successfully became not only a credit card offer programme to users, but HSBC also impressed them that by listening and caring what they need. And this campaign created the new partnership between HSBC and Yahoo, which benefit both HSBC cardholders and Yahoo users.