Chase UK on getting shortlisted for the UK Content Awards

When you think of financial services communications, if you’re anything like the average consumer, you might feel baffled by what’s on offer. 44% of consumers surveyed believed that banks could do more to help them better understand their money.

Chase UK (launched September 2021) is a digital bank that decided to take a fresh approach. Instead, strategy would see communications, specifically content marketing, as a key means of positively engaging consumers with the Chase brand, with aims to ultimately drive brand awareness and trust.

Engaging the market wouldn’t be easy. Whilst Chase is a US giant (over 60m digital customers), it was virtually unknown here in the UK.

What was the strategy?

Chase wants to become the bank of choice for UK customers, offering a broad set of products that meet people’s financial needs. Chase believes it’s in a unique position to offer customers a seamless banking experience combined with the reassurance of an established and trusted bank like JPMorgan Chase.

Customers like the straightforward and easy to use app, the ability to speak to a real person instantly should they need support, and the fact that their products and features have been designed to help them spend, and save, in a way that works for them.

When Chase launched, it wanted to achieve steady growth (2m users in just over two years), providing consumers with an alternative banking choice.

At the heart of Chase’s content strategy: its digital magazine, The Hub. Its success was to be measured against strategic objectives.

To ensure Chase’s content strategy was effective, it needed to understand what made its potential customers tick. Further research enabled Chase to identify and articulate characteristics across seven key demographics. Findings then informed topics, tone of voice and messaging.

The content strategy provides both prospective and existing customers with:

• An easily accessible, topical news stream that takes inspiration from trending social topics and money forum comments to provide a different perspective
• A magazine-like experience. Deliberate styling to maximise appeal to our target audience
• Broad articles that appeal to our heartland audience (e.g., How you could retire with friends), everyday topics on how to budget, save or invest
• Precision marketing, with themes appealing to different demographics. E.g. empty nesters
• Easy-to-understand content. Our tone of voice is deliberately positive, informal and friendly, aiming for a reading age of 12, ensuring accessibility for those with poor reading skills, learning disabilities or for whom English is a second language. We also avoid stuffing writing with search terms/links just to drive traffic (this hasn’t dented success – c.25% of traffic comes from organic search)
• Articles that push boundaries including How to deal with the burden of Black Tax and How neurodiversity can affect your pocket

In addition, Chase also uses campaigns to attract new traffic to The Hub.

As a regulated financial institution, Chase’s communications have to comply with extensive regulations put in place to protect consumers and the market.

In addition to being compliant, identifying boundary-pushing topics has formed a further strand of Chase’s strategy – keeping reading interesting, but also promoting inclusion, and helping to cement its reputation as forward-thinking.

Claudia Rossler, Head of Customer Experience for Chase said: “We strive to make content about money and our financial lives as accessible and meaningful as we can for a diverse customer community. We’re delighted the judges have recognised this focus by shortlisting us for both the Finance Content Campaign of the Year and Content Strategy of the Year.”