Media: Events, Content, Earned Media
Year: 2015
How do you get creative freelancers on board with your program? We thought the best way was to give them a stake in it, by letting them design it themselves.
THE BRIEF: Technology has made it easy for design and technology freelancers to sell their services to clients across the world. But one of the biggest challenges they face is getting paid on time, especially as their work typically transcends borders.
Our task was to convince freelancers across Southeast Asia of that PayPal could help them receive payment in a safe, timely, convenient manner.
THE INSIGHT: Freelancers pride themselves on ‘making’ in two senses: practicing their craft in design and tech, and practicing their independence as a sole-trader. But they don’t have the support and knowledge-sharing you get when you work for an organization.
Could we provide them with support they needed to make it themselves? And could we do it by tapping into their sense of making things on their own – by involving them in the design of our program?
THE IDEA: We created Self Made, a community insight-sharing platform for freelancers from around Southeast Asia - where every element was designed by, and curated and crowd-sourced from by the freelance community.
EXECUTION:
A targeted social media program including lead-generation content drove engagement and directed freelancers to sign-up for PayPal. We invited influential freelancers to lead the discussion including, digital nomad, Jon YongFook (Singapore), designer, Jon Myers (Vietnam), web UI designer and illustrator, Janine Pring (Philippines), and founder of co-working space, The Hub, Grace Sai (Singapore).
The campaign culminated in an inaugural Self Made community event in Singapore, with freelancers and media from around the region. Topics for discussion were sourced through social posts and freelancers were commissioned to create assets and materials for the event.
Content from our event was amplified in social, and through earned media - with journalists from the Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines in attendance at the event. To supplement our multi-market earned media program, we executed a media partnership with Tech in Asia to further extend the impact of this campaign across the region.
RESULTS:
Communications Outcomes
• Social impact - The freelance community engaged with us close to one million times with an overall engagement rate of 24.8% and cost per engagement of $0.01.
• Event and content engagement- our inaugural Self Made event, attended by 70 freelancers, generated video content that had 2.3 million impressions and was watched 437,000 times across the region at an engagement rate of 19.9%.
•Earned Media - 168 pieces of positive coverage across 10 countries in Asia including key regional outlets such as CNBC.com and Tech in Asia, and top tier national publications including Philippine Star, The Jakarta Post, Vietnam News Agency and Yahoo Finance Singapore.
Business Outcomes
•Customer acquisition - A 120% increase in new PayPal users acquired, compared to the same period the previous month.
•Increase in website traffic - There was a 52% increase in website traffic to PayPal’s freelancer sign-up page
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