“AMBITIOUS are a brilliant agency to work with. They have been highly professional and engaging to work with. We have appreciated regular challenge and consultancy on our approach from Day 1. Alongside excellent campaign and content ideas. They have also been very adapting to our specific needs and requirements. Highly recommended.”
Alex Hall, SJP Academy
ST. JAMES’S PLACE FINANCIAL ADVISER ACADEMY
Communications strategy, Earned media relations, Content creation, Research and insight, SEO
Objectives
We were briefed with creating a campaign that would highlight the opportunity for aspiring entrepreneurs to set up their own business, under the St. James’s Place partner practice network, as a financial adviser. This campaign would co-inside with the Academy’s 10-year anniversary.
Target Audience
Our audiences were two-fold:
- Qualified people already working in financial advice
- People who were ‘new to financial advice’, but with transferrable skills
Insight
We produced an SEO insights report, including keyword research and content optimisation research, to ensure that the evergreen pieces of content we produced would rank for prominent search terms, relevant to changing careers.
Our strategy was to use a combination of owned and earned channels to get the message out to these two key audiences. We exploited the existing owned channels of the Academy and its ambassadors, alongside a media relations campaign to drive brand awareness while supporting SEO.
Ideas
Coined ’10 out of 10’ the concept for our campaign was built around the stories of 10 Academy alumni, all of whom had gone on to set up their own business under the SJP umbrella.
- 10 success stories
- 10 different backgrounds
- 10 years
We wanted to show the journey that each of these individuals took to get to the Academy, what their motivations were for ‘changing lanes’, what the outcomes were professionally and personally and their aspirations for the future.
To grab the imagination of our audiences, we needed to show the human side of this story. It needed emotional resonance.
Alongside these case studies, we produced a series of ‘evergreen’ content pieces offering readers advice and tips on how to get into the financial advisory market. These were optimised to support the keywords we had uncovered in the insight research.
Impact
During the campaign, we recorded the following successes:
LinkedIn:
- 46% engagement rate in campaign-related posts
- 875 total post reactions
- 121 post shares
- 13 keywords ranked for content
Earned media
- 12 pieces of media coverage
- Combined readership of 1,625,166 from online media coverage
- 8 backlinks to the SJPA website generated in third-party media
