Putting best practices into practice

By telling its story at scale, Bendigo Bank drives pipeline opportunities worth 100x its marketing investment

Effective story telling helped drive SMB growth opportunities on LinkedIn

In its refreshed B2B marketing activity, Bendigo Bank chose LinkedIn to reach its target audience of small and medium businesses (SMBs) and mid-market companies. It incorporated best practices for full-funnel marketing at every step of the way, earning multi-million-dollar pipeline opportunities within two months.

Having never conducted a full-scale marketing campaign on LinkedIn before, the bank’s marketing team wanted to leverage the platform’s potential in its go-to-market strategy.

Working in collaboration with LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, the team developed a full-funnel strategy with the aim of driving sales leads for its business banking team.

The two-month pilot campaign produced notable short-term results, including multi-million dollars in pipeline opportunities. The bank also earned increased brand awareness and audience engagement. This set the stage for more effective demand generation in the future.

The story of brand to demand

As a community-focused bank with a proven 162-year history of feeding into community prosperity, not off it, Bendigo Bank has a treasure trove of local stories. The pilot campaign was an opportunity for it to start telling these stories at scale, to a wider audience.

“We wanted to show those who were not familiar with our value proposition just how personal our business bankers are. We wanted to help them understand who we are as a bank and what we stand for,” said Amy Goodes, Head of Marketing – Business & Agribusiness.

This formed the creative inspiration for a series of customer videos that stood out from run-of-the-mill testimonials. With real stories told in a fun and entertaining manner, engagement rates for these videos peaked at 14.9% —over 2x higher than the bank’s internal target and almost 10x that of LinkedIn’s industry benchmarks.

While videos were performing well and engagement was relatively high across the board, Bendigo Bank noticed lead volume from website conversions was comparatively low.

The success of the pilot campaign has also prompted Bendigo Bank to adopt an always-on marketing strategy with LinkedIn. It remains committed to a test-and-learn mindset as it continues to engage audiences and drive business results.