Alexforbes
Launch Campaign
Case Study
About Alexforbes
Before this launch, Alexforbes was known as Alexander Forbes, an investment, health and employee benefits provider with decades of experience safeguarding their client’s well-being.
The Challenage
South Africa’s largest pension fund administrator is undergoing a transformation – in both name and presentation. Alexander Forbes is now Alexforbes, gaining a new logo and design language. Dynamic shades of teal replace, orange and black, and circular motifs visually communicate connection. Along with several other changes, this launch put a focus on the relationship Alexforbes aims to foster. “This shift aligns with our vision of becoming the most impactful provider of financial advice serving both individual customers and institutional clients,” said CEO Dawie de Villiers.
For this launch, Digitlab was required to prepare the world, and Alexforbes, for a digital presence that lived up to a new ambition.
Our Roles
Digitlab worked closely with IBM to find direction for the Alexforbes Group website overhaul, as well as preparing design resources for the brand’s internal communications platforms.
Further, our media and creative teams developed the social media strategies and assets for a new age of social media presence. Digitlab introduced Alexforbes to Instagram and established a powerful modular design system to make social media communications a breeze. We then applied these design principles to all Digital Media Advertising content, as our team managed the delivery and execution of digital media assets with the company’s media partners.
Our Solution
In short, Digitlab was brought in to handle the following aspects of the digital launch initiative:
- Consult on various internal panels as the digital lead for the launch. Advising on brand channel rollout, social channel management, technical implementation, MarTech solutions, and content design.
- Develop the SEO strategy for the Group website and content teams.
- Assemble and manage bespoke, agile, front-end development teams to deliver rebranded, customer-facing portals within the rollout of the new brand.
- Design, develop and launch internal campaign material on digital platforms, including the internal campaign site, employee advocacy campaigns, and email signature marketing.
- Develop the social media launch campaign.
- Design all additional digital media material.
Digitlab developed how the Alexforbes brand would look and sound on social media platforms, helped roll the brand out to numerous websites and provided practical digital assistance to ensure employees were able to easily follow branding guidelines.
After building the essential design infrastructure for the brand, content creation was easy. For example, posts could demonstrate the symbolic meaning behind the ‘connector’ with motion. Large groups of posts, or content plans, were unified by monthly themes. These strategic themes gave the messaging focus, metrics a clear goal to measure, and imagery an influential communicative role. Cinematic footage was used to bookmark these pivotal thematic introductions.
Along with a strong focus on design, we embraced new photographic content to express brand values, specify unique business pillars, and resonate with a broader Zeitgeist.
The team also supplied media material for launch projects, such as a News24 Takeover campaign – which bombarded the popular news site with branded content speaking to the unveiling of the new brand on launch day.
Digitlab ran the regular SEO audits and assessments necessary to develop an SEO strategy for a client. However, in the case of Alexforbes, we presented an SEO strategy to integrate SEO into their working processes instead of simply becoming an outsourced service.
We developed a strategy that took the aspects of technical, content, on-page and off-page SEO and integrated them into the existing processes of content development, image management, website maintenance, PR and marketing. Our SEO strategy was carefully designed to integrate with the business to leverage the enormous value of the existing processes already in place.
The strategy also brought in the necessary component for tracking long-term and meaningful growth for online brands by building a Content Cornerstone approach and monitoring key metrics towards crucial business deliverables.
In true Digitlab nature, we made ourselves available to assist the Alexforbes team in the lead-up to launching the new brand. One such area was producing a Brandbox, so all Alexforbes employees had the right tools to create correctly branded assets, such as letterheads and PDF tools.
The Brandbox was developed in collaboration with a local PR firm, Blue Moon Corporate Communications, which aimed to make the Alexforbes brand as visceral as possible. At the same time, Digitlab focused on creating a great user experience with practical access to important content and assets related to the rollout of the brand throughout the organisation.
Employee Advocacy Campaign – Newsletter
Another piece of the social media puzzle Digitlab introduced was to build the volume of organic reach the brand received by encouraging its proud and passionate employees to share brand content on their social media channels. An employee advocacy programme is built on the principle that employees are hired to be experts in their given field – meaning they are passionate and willing to speak about specific topics. An EAP newsletter puts the tools in the hands of employees to share social content with their audiences, engaging social media users who may have never come across the messaging through a traditional, branded approach. Employees tend to enjoy programs because it leverages their knowledge and allows them to share their expertise.
To further amplify the launch messaging of the Alexforbes brand, 2048 influential employees were selected to be part of the program. During the launch window, two employee advocacy emailers were sent to this list of employees with multiple articles for them to consider sharing with their audiences.
Digitlab was involved in designing these emailers, curating content and creating the trackable link structure to monitor the results of Alexforbes’s EAP efforts.
Pre-Launch Campaign
To accompany the rollout of the Alexforbes rebrand, Digitlab decided to use the first month’s content to unpack the theme of connection and introduce the Alexforbes audience to the colon – the key logo device found at the start of the Alexforbes logo.
The colon is a grammatical symbol used to join two phrases or concepts. Alexforbes embraced it as a symbol of connecting their clients to their dreams, goals, and desired outcomes.
A roadmap for the social content to be created and shared in the coming months was also thought out, gradually introducing the new brand to clients and unpacking more of who Alexforbes is and what they stand for.
Social Agility
Our team also remained agile throughout the Alexforbes rebrand campaign to leverage any activity that would build excitement around the brand. One such moment was the iconic reveal of the massive Alexforbes building banner in Sandton. On seeing the video shared in WhatsApp groups, our social team quickly edited it and posted it to social to celebrate the unveiling with the Alexforbes community.
Results
This content was posted in the days leading up to the launch, yet still generated 66 776 impressions and 3 358 engagements.
These metrics show the general excitement that the social audiences experienced, leading to officially launching the new brand.
3172 pieces of branded content were voluntarily shared across employees’ social profiles over the launch campaign.
This attributed an organic social reach far superior to the norm. When looking at the value of that organic reach, the impressions it gathers, the actions it generates, the engagement it creates, and the reputation it builds from credible and personal ‘word of mouth’ marketing – it’s almost impossible to attribute an exact figure.
However, using the measurement tactics of the PR industry, if we use the average of Facebook’s Cost per Action in the Finance Industry, then this organic social media employee advocacy campaign generated an AVE of roughly R4,3 million Rand for Alexforbes.
The social launch of the Alexforbes rebrand generated total impressions of 3 179 173 with a 6,43% engagement rate.
In addition to the launch campaign, the next three months of always-on content were dedicated to unpacking the brand. This content, together with other brand activities, generated further collective growth across social media producing 15 million impressions and growing the brand following by over half a million people.
The key metric we looked at to measure the success of our work was sentiment. While engagement and web traffic are still essential indicators of content that resonates with its audience, we earmarked sentiment to determine whether audiences understood and bought into this content.
The team were delighted to see that negative sentiment had dropped by 20% on its starting point within the first three months of the new brand, with positive sentiment staying 50% higher than the norm in previous periods. Another win for a digital brand launch encapsulating a humancentric approach and the brand reaping the rewards of it.
The Digitlab team rolled the brand out onto social channels.