#MarketingExcellenceAwards SG 2021 highlight: UOB goes beyond banking to empower SMEs with industry insights

United Overseas Bank (UOB) is committed to building its footprint across SEA, particularly in the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market. Wanting to grow and differentiate its business banking proposition for SMEs across the region, UOB worked with Immedia Content to create a new content strategy, based on UOB’s "Beyond Banking" mantra. This was to better connect with SMEs by creating relevant, engaging content rather than simply communicating the UOB brand, products and services.

Using Immedia’s proprietary AI and machine learning-driven content marketing platform, Contrend, UOB was able to engage SMEs and differentiate themselves from competitors. The campaign was a success and impressed the judges, winning the gold award for Excellence in Marketing Innovation at MARKETING INTERACTIVE’s Marketing Excellence Awards Singapore 2021.

Challenge

UOB faced intense competition from local banks and emerging digital-first players across the region. In addition, UOB had hugely varying levels of awareness and engagement amongst SMEs in their five key markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. UOB realised that it needed to increase engagement levels with SMEs with a new content strategy that will incorporate UOB’s "Beyond Banking" mantra to differentiate themselves from their competitors. 

UOB’s Beyond Banking team also needed the ability to launch products and brand messages quickly and efficiently across multiple languages and cultures within limited budgets. 

Strategy

To increase SME engagement levels, competitive differentiation, traffic to UOB's Beyond Banking product pages and marketing qualified leads, UOB and Immedia Content recognised the need to build an inclusive, relevant platform that clearly identified SMEs’s content preferences to ensure that each local market was engaged and did not feel marginalised. To do this, UOB used Immedia’s Contrend platform to create a complete and accurate data set that would identify similarities and differences for each market.

Contrend was able to assess:

1. Audience content topic, format and style preferences 
2. Content benchmarked against competitors and the wider content landscape
3. Content relevance to the target audience 
4. Opportunities to maximise content impact

Contrend was then able to recommend content topics, formats and messaging styles that increase audience engagement. Over time it predicted optimum future content topics, formats and channels that will deliver maximum content ROI for UOB. 

Execution

Contrary to UOB management beliefs, Contrend analysis showed that SMEs had no real affinity towards funding or loans and did not want content about financial products and support. In fact, few banks in each market created content about that wider spectrum of topics that SMEs are truly interested in. This insight generated a significant opportunity for UOB to differentiate itself from competitors and engage with its target audience.

Four regional content pillars that could be applied to each market were identified, with up to 15 subtopic groups under each content pillar ranked to reflect local preferences in each market.

Regional (SEA) SME content pillars:

1. Learn from industry peers and experts
2. Manage your business
3. Investing in your people
4. Staying ahead of tech and market trends 

With the content pillars, UOB was able to create regionally consistent but locally relevant content calendars for each market. The new content pillars were validated with local UOB teams and a selection of their SME clients to ensure relevance and gauge interest. Following approval from regional and local UOB teams, Immedia moved to content creation for UOB’s SME clients. 

While previous content was created around traditional brand and product-driven themes, UOB now created new topics for each market and engaged local, expert writers to create relevant and engaging content that would resonate with local SME audiences and local UOB marketing teams. UOB was able to win the hearts and minds of SMEs by showing that it understood relevant topics and issues SME customers faced. This also allowed UOB to align to its pledge of delivering a Beyond Banking experience to their customers. 

To ensure consistency and sustainability of the content strategy, UOB created a content hub called "Business Banking Insights", built to reflect the four new regional content pillars. 

Results

UOB and Immedia’s content creation strategy was a success. Traffic to UOB’s Beyond Banking product pages saw a 120% increase and the BB sales team saw a significant increase in marketing qualified leads that translated to a 300% increase in conversions. UOB’s audience engagement across all markets also rose by 192%.

UOB was able to track new metrics that give visibility over competitors and audience preferences in each market and as a result, transform the performance of its content across key regions.