CHALLENGE

DHL Express decided to freshen up its marketing strategy. Instead of a purely sales-led approach, could DHL Express incorporate a content-led strategy to drive new account signups?

The brief was simple enough: DHL Express wanted an engaging global lead-generation campaign that would target, inspire and convert potential e-commerce customers looking to export to abroad.

INSIGHT

E-commerce is now a trillion dollar market. A third of consumers expect express shipping in most regions. There are over 26.7m searches per month for online marketing queries. So the need to stand out and engage this audience was an absolute necessity.

This necessity translated into a clear strategic brief. The campaign needed to:

SEIZE THE OPPORTUNITY

Target, engage, educate and convert potential e-retailers.

RAISE AWARENESS

Raise DHL’s brand awareness across B2B customers and bring authenticity and humanity to stories of global e-commerce.

GENERATE CONVERSION

Make DHL the delivery provider of choice for e-commerce.

SOLUTION

We came up with and delivered an integrated content marketing campaign, led by the “Find Your Tribe” film series, designed to engage users with wit and relatable characters to demonstrate that, in a connected world, businesses can find new avenues for growth from unexpected areas, anywhere on earth.

To support the films series, we created a destination website, social content, articles, interviews and advice guides. The creative assets all pointed towards a single idea: that DHL Express is about more than just sending packages from A to B – it is also being the perfect expert partner to help grow your business globally.

RESULTS

An integrated approach across media, paid social, film, print and editorial content meant that the target audience was successfully reached and engaged. Every asset was created with a specific goal and carefully defined audience. The creative look and feel marked a departure from the traditional DHL Express approach, moving it instead towards a more contemporary space and speaking to the audience in a way that reinforced the brand association between the campaign content and the e-commerce business messaging.

The campaign reached multiple online marketing channels, including organic and paid search, rich ad placements, programmatic advertising, online PR and SEO marketing. The user journeys were exhaustively mapped out, giving every potential user profile a logical route through the content that made sense; moving from one topic to the other while still subtly developing the call to action and encouraging new account applications.

And there are some big numbers: The campaign, led by the Find Your Tribe films, has been hugely effective. It has generated tangible leads globally in volumes that DHL Express have not seen before. The numbers speak for themselves: