The FinLab was struggling to acquire new members and failing to hit the initial acquisition goals they had set for their online launch. The accelerator had big ambitions of expanding their reach and acquiring new members with their online launch, but this wasn’t the case early on.

One of their primary marketing channels for member acquisition was leveraging social media – primarily Facebook – to increase brand awareness and get in front of new potential members. But their posts were rarely seeing much engagement, if any at all.

Already struggling to meet their goals, the Coronavirus pandemic did nothing to help matters.

Not sure how to achieve their goals, The FinLab approached us at Brew Interactive. We set out to help The FinLab achieve two primary goals:

• Improve their brand awareness across Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand
• Acquire more members to meet their acquisition goals

Persona Creation & Documentation

To meet these goals, we knew we needed to start by getting intimately familiar with The FinLab’s ideal members.

We began by interviewing The FinLab team about their ideal members and UOB’s best clients. But we wanted to take our persona creation a step further by interviewing SME owners across Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

This step is critical – as many businesses may have tunnel vision on who they believe their buyer personas to be, but they haven’t taken the time to sit down with them – or they haven’t in quite some time.

We dug into these SME owners’ struggles, challenges, and aspirations.

We then documented our findings and created a few key member personas for The FinLab. These personas would guide and fuel all of our efforts moving forward.

Inbound Strategy

Once we were crystal clear on what kinds of SME owners The FinLab was targeting, we crafted a unique inbound marketing strategy for them.

1. Social Media Strategy and Content Creation

Leveraging social media trends and industry data across the region, we supported and directed The FinLab’s social media strategy and assisted with content creation.

We catered their social media content and overall strategy to target and attract the personas outlined in our documentation exercise.

2. Repurposed Webinar Content

Once the COVID pandemic began making waves, The FinLab hosted a number of webinars in an attempt to engage their members.

We went through these webinars to pull out data and insights for additional content creation. Repurposing their existing content helped us produce valuable content quickly, rather than having to spend time partnering with them on content from scratch.

3. Ran Data-Driven Ads to Generate Member Acquisition

To help The FinLab meet member acquisition goals, we set up a number of advertising campaigns targeting their member personas.

Every month, at Brew we spend anywhere between $300,000 and $400,000 on ads for all our clients combined. Because of this, we possess a massive amount of real-time data to know what works and what doesn’t.

Thanks to this data, we were able to rapidly A/B test creative, messaging, and copy for The FinLab in order to optimize their ads quickly – instead of waiting months to gather adequate data.

4. Used HubSpot to Nurture Existing Members

Lastly, we wanted to help The FinLab nurture existing members who would be good fits as UOB clients.

We met with their sales team to gain an understanding of their outreach process, and then guided them on how to use HubSpot’s CRM for the most effective and efficient outreach possible.

Even the slightest tweaks to a sales process can prove massive results.