The current state of the insights function headed into the new year
GET THE REPORTSoFi fuels rapid ad experimentation with consumer data at the heart
SoFi achieved a 20% overall increase in advertising effectiveness in a short time. How did they do it? Rapid experimentation enabled by consumer insights. Read on for more of the story.
Key results
20% increase in overall ad effectiveness
Advertising significantly better than the rest of the category
Rapid iteration with fast consumer insights
Data democratized across teams
If you’re sitting in a room with a creative director, art director and copywriter making an ad, you’re going to be clouded by your own opinions. You need some outside perspective. That’s what Zappi enables us to do. Understand what real people think.
Opportunity
Making the business truly consumer centric
SoFi is dedicated to always putting its members at the heart of everything it does. To be truly customer centric and make the right decisions about how to serve its members, the company has to be able to identify people’s needs, wants, desires and pain points.
The marketing team saw an opportunity to bring people into SoFi’s ad development process easily and often to make sure the ideas resonated and added value to their customers.
Two of the company’s values were important considerations for an insights partner:
Iterate, learn, innovate: SoFi needed a research solution that gave its teams accessible data that let them test, learn and iterate quickly.
Get to the truth and make principle based decisions: Everyone needed to be empowered to easily collect and act upon insights to take the right decisions.
Approach
Adopting Zappi Creative Suite to unlock creative excellence
SoFi partnered with Zappi to use the Creative Suite to iterate, optimize and validate its ads before investing in-market. The Zappi platform’s easy setup and intuitive reporting empowers everyone at SoFi to use data to inform their decisions and get closer to consumers. From the marketing team to their creative partners, everyone is able to learn from ongoing consumer feedback on advertising at different stages of development to drive strong performance and grow the SoFi brand.
The Creative Suite provides the perfect combination of quantitative evaluation and qualitative diagnosis on individual ads, as well as analytics that allow the team to look across all ads to learn over time and create an ongoing cycle of improvement.
According to Jean-Michel Hoffman, Sr. Director of Brand Marketing, “Doing rapid research with Zappi has been fundamental to building a strong brand with a great opportunity to build equity that resonates with our customer.”
Impact
20% increase in overall ad effectiveness
Lauren Stafford-Webb, SoFi’s CMO, says of the impact of partnering with Zappi, “We’ve done great work to build awareness and associations with our ‘get your money right’ promise. A lot of the work we have done in partnership with Zappi. We have been able to create the highest performing creative in the brand’s history. We have improved overall ad effectiveness by over 20% in the last years since working with Zappi.”
Impact
Advertising that beats the rest of the category
Lauren continues, “Zappi has allowed us to iterate to get to a place where all of our TV copy is now significantly above the industry average. And when you are trying to build a brand from the ground up, that most people the first time they see your commercial is the first time they’ve seen your brand, you’ve got to nail it! We’ve been able to do that thanks to our internal and creative agency and the partnership with Zappi and the great tools they’ve given us access to.”
Impact
Rapid iteration with fast consumer insights
“The improvement in ad effectiveness comes down to rapid iteration,” says Lauren. “An example of how our day works. We have a couple of edits. We throw them into Zappi in the morning. Within 3-4 hours we have both qual and quant feedback on all key metrics — favorability, uniqueness, consideration. We can walk away and say ‘OK, these are the changes we need to make’ and by the end of the day I have 3 new edits.”
Impact
Data democratization throughout SoFi
“My team and our creative director spend a lot of time with our Zappi dashboard,” says Lauren. “They come to comms reviews with the dashboard. We have really embraced it as a tool. It helps us know we are being successful, that we are moving in the right direction and doing things that will delight our customers and move our business."
Impact
Business growth
Lauren concludes, “We’ve been able to grow our investment in the brand through the confidence we get from the Zappi data. And as a result we’ve really been able to grow our business. We’re super grateful for the tools Zappi have provided to the business — it has made a huge difference in our success.”
Having a tool like Zappi that everyone can use to get to good business outcomes has been very powerful for us.
