Engaging niche audiences through marketing campaigns is vital for business growth. However, reaching these audiences can be more complicated than it seems, needing certain nuances and messages that are highly relevant.
To thrive in the market as a stand-out investment platform, IG has collaborated with Yahoo to launch a data-driven campaign that is aimed at increasing engagement for its platform.
This case study delves into IG’s challenges and its strategies to solve them with its partnership with Yahoo as it leveraged technology and identity solutions to reach niche users.
Challenge
Investment platform IG wanted to widen prospects for its CFD trading feature, a derivative trading method that would appeal the most to advanced traders who are familiar with financial markets. Wanting to achieve maximum impact while targeting highly relevant users, IG tapped Yahoo for a campaign that was hyper-focused on reaching a specific set of audiences and pushing them towards meaningful action.
Objectives
IG’s goal is to target a highly niche audience such as active traders, investment seekers, and high-net-worth individuals, driving them to action. IG aims to gain new investors and encourage more users on its platform.
Solution
IG’s solution is a strategy that leveraged AI and sophisticated identity solutions to reach a niche audience, delivering a 6-fold increase in clickthrough rates with a cost-per-land efficiency that exceeded 35% compared to similar campaigns by IG.
Singapore has a vibrant retail investor market across all ages, with a majority of Singapore investors remaining actively invested throughout bull and bear conditions. A 2023 survey showed that about 67% of Singaporeans said their investment goal was to build wealth over time and 75% have also maintained or even raised their risk levels over the past twelve months.
Wanting to acquire new investors on its platform and encourage more users to utilise their platform for CFD trading, a high-level form of trading that lets users trade based on price movements, IG embarked on a campaign with OMD Singapore and the Yahoo Demand-Side Platform (DSP) to reach their key audience.
The strategy? To go wide and long on a niche market of experienced and ambitious investors – a sub-group of traders well-versed with financial markets – and drive them to register for a new account on IG’s platform.
With the goal to target a highly niche audience in mind, the campaign needed to maintain optimum relevance. Additionally, with competitors also gunning for the limited audience pool, the strategy needed to be anchored on a deep understanding of audiences, their needs and interests. The campaign would also require the ability to adapt and implement analysis and insights in real-time to optimise ad delivery and ensure the right type of audience sees the message, at scale. This set a cutting-edge approach in motion: programmatic ads, powered by a potent combination of AI and identity solutions, to power rich yet precise targeting of audience profiles that would maximise impressions and deliver optimum performance.
Establishing a strong base of a highly niche group of users at scale – active traders, investment seekers, and high-net-worth individuals – entailed a sophisticated and privacy-centric mix of identity solutions that utilised Yahoo’s first-party data alongside identifiers of users that have visited IG’s website.
Data security and respecting data privacy were of utmost importance, especially as this cohort was more likely to be more conscious of how their data is used than the average user.
First – the campaign sought to prospect segments of people who were likely to be interested in high-return investments. Using Yahoo’s first-party data, based on anonymised content consumption and interest data such as investment seekers and those interested in exchange-traded fund (ETF) investments, the campaign planned to reach precise first-party audience segments such as high net-worth individuals.
Second – the campaign also prospected people who were already actively trading. Prospecting these audiences meant employing cross-screen data signals from purchase receipts and mail domains of active traders and investment seekers – including those who have subscribed to investment-related mail domains and services.
Predictive Audiences, powered by Yahoo Blueprint, further set the stage for robust targeting plan by utilising an artificial intelligence (AI)-based algorithm with over one million dimensions to accurately identify and reach audiences with a high propensity for conversion.
The campaign then implemented insights from Dot Pixel to expand the audience pool through the creation of lookalike audiences. Dot Pixel also enabled a stronger and more collaborative re-engagement tactic of IG’s website visitors alongside lookalike audiences.
Having reached a highly niche cohort at scale, the next step involved quickly applying insights to refine the campaign and ensure close alignment with audience needs. This required a sophisticated arsenal of tools that would help IG and Yahoo maximise this impact.
For this purpose, the campaign activated Yahoo Blueprint, a central AI suite that powers performance-based solutions within the Yahoo DSP that optimises goals across the entire campaign lifecycle, enhancing decisioning and driving performance with AI-powered audience insights and recommendations.
With a mix of AI and identity solutions to create a complete and in-depth picture of the audience, Yahoo Blueprint’s enhanced capabilities would enable 10x more data processing, ensuring campaign success through robust AI-enabled predictions and insights. Omniscope, an algorithmic forecasting tool within Yahoo Blueprint that is powered by over a million data signals and bid request data, was also used to accurately plan and compare projected reach and performance of different targeting parameters, including audience segments, across various channels.
At the activation and optimisation stage, creatives with direct messaging and strong design were deployed to target experienced and ambitious traders – resolute decision-makers who are often pressed for time. The target audience was urged to take immediate action through creatives and messaging that highlighted IG’s strongest points as a CFD trading platform upfront, including its extended trading hours for over 70 US shares.
Yahoo Blueprint’s insights provided guidance and projections for the bidding process, as well as ad delivery and efficiency. These helped fine-tune bids, adjust spend pacing based on budget, and target the right person, at the right time and place for maximum efficiency and performance.
Results
Amid a highly competitive market for trading platforms, IG carved out an edge in a highly niche space, achieving a dual combo of efficiency and performance by leveraging a future-forward arsenal of AI capabilities and privacy-centric identity solutions powered by rich first-party data.
A testament to its precision, the optimisation through Yahoo Blueprint and a sophisticated mix of identity and first-party data solutions effectively drove momentum for the campaign’s performance, achieving the following:
- Implementation of Yahoo Blueprint from the onset and throughout the campaign lifecycle ensured deep understanding and insights to efficiently prospect and reach niche audiences.
- Cost-per-land efficiency that exceeded 35% compared to similar campaigns by IG that did not utilise Yahoo Blueprint
- 6 times higher clickthrough rates (CTR) compared to similar campaigns by IG that did not utilise Yahoo Blueprint
With outstanding outcomes in efficiency and effectiveness, IG renewed its campaign with OMD Singapore and Yahoo DSP for another 4 months.
Against the challenge of reaching niche audiences and spurring them to action, IG, OMD Singapore and Yahoo DSP effectively leveraged the capabilities of sophisticated identity solutions and AI-driven Yahoo Blueprint to power audience understanding, insights and decision-making to secure a winning investment.
“IG was keen on targeting a highly niche group of investors, a cohort of people with very specific needs and wants, who would be interested in utilising their platform for specialised investment methods. Looking to deliver results at scale and more, our strategy harnessed the power of identity solutions and AI to sharpen the campaign’s focus towards highly relevant user profiles. Fully utilising Yahoo Blueprint’s performance-based solutions, the campaign delivered outstanding outcomes, offering purpose and value for investors and realising desired results for IG’s business,” Kenneth Koh, head of commercial sales in SEA at Yahoo, said.
“At IG, we look for high-impact and effective ways to reach the most relevant audiences that would resonate with our various investment offerings. Yahoo helped us tremendously in capturing the attention of the potential investors – highly experienced traders who would be interested in our CFD trading service – and effectively hear our message. The results have been outstanding and we look forward to exploring greater possibilities in the next phase with Yahoo,” Rafael Victorino, marketing executive at IG, said.
