Who are BlackRock?
BlackRock is trusted to manage more money than any other investment manager in the world, helping millions of people and the world’s biggest institutions and governments reach their investing goals.* The company has over 12,000 employees operating in 30 countries supporting clients worldwide.
The Challenge: Limited Resources
The Latin America & Iberia region is a growth business for BlackRock. By establishing relationships with media outlets in these regions, the Latin America & Iberia team has increased brand awareness and traffic back to their web properties.
On the creative side, they have no dedicated resources to develop custom interactive experiences for media placements. However, the marketing team feels strongly that robust digital content is worth the investment in order to stand out on media sites and provide unique value to readers.
Molly Henning, Relationship Marketing Associate, Latin America & Iberia, and Andrea Herrera, Latin America & Iberia Marketing Analyst, knew they needed an external technology solution to help them develop digital content quickly and cost-effectively.
“We wanted an opportunity to do something different with our marketing,” says Molly. “As a regional division of a larger organization, we often find ourselves leveraging content from other teams. This time, we wanted to be the ones doing something new and creative to share with the company.”
After the BlackRock team was introduced to Ceros at an event in fall 2015, they immediately saw the potential for the platform to help them achieve these goals.
The Solution: Scalable Content Creation
In spring 2016, the Latin America & Iberia team was gearing up for the launch of a Factor Investing campaign. To support the launch of the campaign in 7 countries across the region, they created an interactive infographic in Ceros. The piece provided an approachable overview of Smart Beta Strategies, a major theme in their campaign.
Leveraging Ceros’ Creative Services team, it took just a few days to design, produce, and publish the infographic, which gave them plenty of time to work with media partners on distribution.
“The whole experience from start to finish was great,” says Molly. “Our piece covered a complex investment topic that is difficult to explain in an easily digestible format. After a preliminary call and creative briefing session with the Ceros team, they were able to capture exactly what we were trying to get across, both from a brand and a messaging perspective.”
Molly and Andrea were also impressed with how quickly the Ceros creative team was able to pivot ideas and come up with an ideal solution based on BlackRock’s feedback—a really important capability, given the tight timeline of the campaign launch.
The Result: Increased Engagement and Partner Interest
The main goal of the Smart Beta infographic was to engage prospects on established financial publisher sites and drive traffic back to BlackRock’s Factor Investing hub. From both perspectives, the campaign was a huge success.
“Comparing the piece to other native content pieces we’ve done in the past, we saw higher engagement with, and an increase in site traffic attributable to, the Ceros infographic,” says Molly. “This traffic was also highly engaged with our site. Having a more visual approach and a consistent look-and-feel between both pieces had a positive impact on engagement.”
The infographic was well received internally by BlackRock’s marketing and sales organization. The team plans to invest further in visual, interactive content creation in the future to drive business results.
“Compared to other native content pieces we’ve done in the past, we saw higher engagement with, and an increase in site traffic attributable to, our Ceros infographic."