Accelerating Brand Influence
Mastercard APAC earns 130% follower growth with consistent, compelling thought leadership
Accelerating Brand Influence
Mastercard APAC earns 130% follower growth with consistent, compelling thought leadership
In Asia Pacific, Mastercard’s APAC Communications team leverages LinkedIn’s targeted reach at scale to influence brand perception. They regularly share media reports, amplify thought leadership articles, and profile their business leaders on the platform using both organic and paid marketing strategies. With the success of Sponsored Content formats like Single Image Ads, Video Ads and Document Ads, Mastercard incorporated Thought Leadership Ads in 2023. This allowed the company to promote posts by their business leaders and delivered even stronger results for the brand.
THE CHALLENGE
Mastercard is committed to long-term brand marketing and raising the visibility of their business leaders. While their existing approach on LinkedIn was producing healthy results, the APAC Comms team was keen on further amplifying their content to reach and influence a targeted business audience across key markets like Singapore, Australia and India.
THE SOLUTION
To help Mastercard optimise its brand marketing strategy for even better results, the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions team recommended Thought Leadership Ads, a new ad format that allows companies to promote posts by their business leaders. The format was a perfect fit for Mastercard’s objectives, enabling them to reinforce the brand’s thought leadership position in the industry while profiling their business leaders.
A diverse cohort of six business leaders were selected for the pilot run of Thought Leadership Ads with the team taking care to feature authentic content that matched each leader’s field of expertise or passion. The ads were then served to a relevant audience, defined by either Skills, Interests or Job Functions in addition to Industries and Geographies.
THE RESULTS
Mastercard APAC’s always-on campaign, which now includes Thought Leadership Ads, has delivered a year-on-year uplift across all key metrics:
130%
increase in APAC followers to Company Page
175%
increase in clickthrough rate (CTR)
169%
increase in Engagement Rate
KEY SUCCESS FACTOR: THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
- Consistent, compelling thought leadership enables Mastercard to build brand trust and credibility in an authentic way
- Adding Thought Leadership Ads fronted by key business leaders encourages community and conversation among key audience segments
- Repurposing existing content for LinkedIn and testing/learning to understand what resonates best with different audience segments
“We view LinkedIn as a strategic marketing partner, especially when it comes to engaging our wide range of stakeholders across the Asia Pacific region. When presented with the opportunity to trial Thought Leadership Ads, we immediately agreed, and are glad we did as the impact was clear. It reaffirms what we all know: that people enjoy hearing from people. One of our executives was delighted to wake up to more than 500 notifications on the first day!”
Barkha Patel
Senior Vice President, Communications, Asia Pacific
Mastercard
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Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Its mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, its innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments and businesses realize their greatest potential. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, Mastercard is building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all. View Company page
Headquarters: New York, USA | No. of Employees: 10,000+ | Industry: Financial Services