Leveraging Influencer Partnerships for ISA Season Success

About InvestEngine

InvestEngine is an award‑winning, industry‑leading investment platform that champions the use of exchange‑traded funds (ETFs). Their DIY portfolios are commission-free and give anyone the tools to make investing easy and accessible. They also offer affordable, fully managed portfolios for those that prefer to leave their investing to their team of experts.

Goals & Objectives

Our ultimate aim was to maximise new user registrations through the affiliate channel for InvestEngine during ‘ISA season’ as part of their wider marketing strategy. We wanted to tap into the fantastic pool of dedicated partners we had built for InvestEngine over the previous three years, and create a fresh set of cost-efficient and trustworthy content which would further increase brand awareness and direct high-quality customers to their Stocks & Shares ISA offering.

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Three specific and measurable objectives directed our strategy:

1. Engage. We identified top performing influencers and effectively engaged them to generate a fresh set of ISA content. This content focused on reviewing the InvestEngine product in an authentic and relatable manner.
2. Build. Over the past 3 years, we have created several successful partnerships for InvestEngine. The clear objective was to have each top performer recommend InvestEngine in all of their ‘best stocks and shares ISA’ YouTube videos.
3. Educate. We aimed to maximise the results of InvestEngine’s top two performing affiliates by launching educational YouTube series throughout ‘ISA season’.

Approach

Since 2021, we have built InvestEngine’s affiliate programme from scratch. By focusing on existing partners for the 2024 ISA campaign, we utilised an existing base, rather than spending resources onboarding new creators. The innovative nature of InvestEngine, and their constant willingness to try something new, complemented our ethos.

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• In January we reviewed the 2023 ISA season, including a list of content generated by influencers who were active on the InvestEngine affiliate programme during this period.
• We ranked these influencers based on year-on-year growth and set a specific goal to generate at least 30 videos, with 12 of them posted by top performing publishers. 
• We also focused on smaller publishers, who were able to effectively create educational content for their audience, building awareness of the platform.

• In February we held calls with our top performing YouTubers, gathering feedback on InvestEngine’s Stocks & Shares ISA, the success of the previous campaigns, and improvements we could make to best incentivise them and their audiences. 
• As content ramped up across March and April, we reviewed performance and reached out to optimise any priority partners underperforming on expectations.

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Challenges

The biggest challenge we faced was ensuring compliance was adhered to, so we worked closely with the InvestEngine compliance team on this. Their prompt feedback ensured publishers were able to deliver content on the same day. The InvestEngine compliance team also recorded a video regarding the FCA guidelines which we shared with our publishers to protect them.

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Results

• InvestEngine featured in a total of 37 YouTube videos with a total of 200,000+ views in the best ISA ranking videos across Feb-May 2024.
• As a direct result of the influencer vertical, completed registrations increased by 170% year-on-year.
• Our click target to InvestEngine’s website was beaten by 27% which led to an 82% increase year-on-year.
• We also beat our completed registrations target by 55% with the CPA being 14% more efficient compared to the previous year.