Brand Campaigns

Challenge: Help customers experience the positive side of financial feels.

Solution: Campaigns like 'Genuine Human Goodness,' in which we reward and delight customers who commit to save for a cause they care about.

(This campaign was a finalist in the 8th Annual Shorty Awards, which "honor the best people and organizations in social media.")

Activation Campaigns

Challenge: Customers who set Goals in their Simple accounts are more likely to save money and love the product. Drive more Goals usage.

Solution: Build timely, targeted landing page experiences like our January, 2017 'Year of New' campaign, which inspired customers to try Goals by saving for a feel-good cause over the first three months of the year.

SEO

Challenge: Generate organic traffic for a bank-like technology company that due to regulatory technicalities can't call itself a bank.

Solution: Work with Legal and Compliance to build blog posts and landing pages around approved language and long-tail keywords.

True Customer Stories

Challenge: Simple is like Microsoft Excel: Everybody uses it differently. Help customers share the unique ways they save.

Solution: Identify leads using social media and build customer experience stories that highlight different use-cases.

Product Education

Challenge: Offer a consistent flow of product education without being stale.

Solution: Create a financial editorial calendar highlighting themes and moments, then use it to drive a steady flow of timely editorialized 'How to Simple' stories.

Product Updates

Challenge: Introduce product developments in a way that can be experienced natively on social.

Solution: Shake down budget to create product GIFs like this one.

Company News

Challenge: Share company news and announcements using a tone that feels more human than a press release.

Solution: Lend editorial support to the Communications team.

Company Culture

Challenge: Develop employer brand in a way that provides value to our audience.

Solution: Craft stories about what we learn and the challenges we face in attempting to build a progressive, diverse, remote-friendly workplace at Simple. 

Lifecycle Support

Challenge: Create content that we can email new customers to help them understand product features like Goals—bonus if it helps humanize the company. 

Solution: Craft stories like this one, where I highlight unexpected quotes and helpful anecdotes from Simple employees about how they use Goals. 

Customer Research

Challenge: Learn about our audience's lifestyle preferences so we can create the most relevant content for each social channel.

Solution: Audience polls!

Personal Finance Education

Challenge: Help customers become more confident with their money.

Solution: Publish 'money mindset' stories that introduce our audience to different ways people think about money. 

GIF Tips

Challenge: Create a recurring content series about personal finance that's both native to social and helpful to our audience.  

Solution: Money GIF Tips!

Inspiration

Challenge: Set a new tone for conversations about money—a topic many people are ashamed to talk about.

Solution: Hire notable/interesting contributors to compose reflective essays rooted in unlikely financial learnings. (Think of these as 'This American Life' style stories about money.)

Industry Thought Leadership

Challenge: Highlight Simple's progressive purview on topics such as diversity.

Solution: Craft honest, authentic editorial that explores what's working, what's not working, and the challenges we still need to tackle.

Executive Inspiration

Challenge: Celebrate milestones—such as Simple's anniversary—in a way that adds value for our audience.

Solution: Share content like this 'What I've Learned' look-back by our CEO Josh, a motivating leader who's fighting to disrupt one of the oldest institutions in the world.

Topical Shares

Challenge: Maintain steady editorial presence in a world of unpredictable compliance holdups.

Solution: Fill any unexpected holes with interesting and topically relevant stories—from compliance-approved publications—that employees are sharing and talking about on Slack.

Seasonal Moments

Challenge: Join conversations about seasonal moments and trending topics in a way that celebrates our brand and doesn't suck.

Solution: Custom GIFs!

Data Insights

Challenge: Is there something interesting we can do with all this data?

Solution: Share 'Insights' stories about the different ways customers across the country spend and what they're saving up to buy.

Lifestyle Budgeting

Challenge: Simple helps customers automatically set money aside toward financial Goals, but those who don't know what to save for are less likely to benefit from the product. Help these customers save using Goals.

Solution: Inspire customers to use Goals through actionable editorialized 'budgets' that they can set in their accounts with the click of a button.

Inside-Out

Challenge: Share a story of values-based decision-making at Simple without sounding smug.

Solution: Compose a magazine-style feature exploring the role company values played when creating our most popular email.

Internal Expertise

Challenge: As an online bank (technically a bank-like-organization), Simple is on the forefront of all sorts of new developments. How can we share our team's expertise?

Solution: Publish expert interviews like this one with our Security team.

Bank Builders

Challenge: Building the bank of the future is hard—and interesting. How do we tell our Engineering team's story natively on social?

Solution: "Bank Makers" series, in which we share micro-stories about that team's interesting desks and keyboards.

Referral Promotions

Challenge: How do we remind customers of our referral program without spamming their inboxes?

Solution: Take to social media with unexpected images that showcase the beautiful wallet customers receive as a reward for referring friends.

Referral Lifecycle

Challenge: Help customers who have already referred their friends find fresh ways to share the love. 

Solution: Craft content like this fun advice post, which helps customers see that when it comes to referrals (and getting that sweet, sweet wallet), friends are everywhere.

Content Emails

Challenge: The internet loves our content, but customers don't always know it exists. Help them find it.

Solution: Offer access to "Money Monday" emails that feature stories, updates, and timely recommended savings Goals. New customers opt into the experience from a lifecycle email or via an email capture on blog posts.

(I worked with a freelance designer to create this template, but due to a shift in priorities, we never put the project live. Click through to see the types of stories and messaging we would have included.)