Lightyear

How do you launch a new app to tackle the notoriously competitive industry of investing?

Following successful funding rounds and big plans for expansion in 2022, Lightyear partnered with us to launch their performance marketing in Europe. Lightyear understood that they needed to optimise their growth across paid search and paid social, as well as improve their creative in order to acquire customers efficiently.

The problem?

How to acquire customers who go on to make a deposit and become regular investors.

The answer?

Create performance-first ads that appeal to the target audience and ensure you have the correct events installed to enable the ad platforms to drive high quality users to the app.

Results:

BARK launched ads across Europe to drive app installs and deposits, in English as well as Estonian, while devising a creative strategy using content creators in order to humanise the brand and build trust in the app for those who hadn’t heard of Lightyear before.

The world of investing is vast, often expensive and difficult to navigate, Lightyear is a relatively new investment app aiming to break these barriers and create a simple and approachable way to invest your money globally. Lightyear allows investors of all types to invest securely in over 3,000 global stocks and pride themselves on being the cheapest investment platform with no hidden costs. With a range of educational features, Lightyear believes that everyone should have access to the tools they need to help develop their financial skills with confidence.

In Q4 2022, Lightyear saw a gap in its performance marketing that was stunting its growth. They had some success in acquiring new users through Meta ads, but they were unable to get their customers to onboard and deposit, the mark of a valuable new user.

BARK identified two key jobs to be done: first, fix their tracking setup so that the valuable events were being passed back into the platform and second, use a best-in-class creative strategy to raise awareness of the brand, tackle objections and attract new customers at scale.

First, we ran a full audit of their app event setup to identify opportunities to improve measurement further down the funnel. Installing the Meta conversion tracking correctly enabled Lightyear to drive high quality users to the app and measure the ROI of their campaigns more accurately. Optimising towards in-app actions rather than app installs significantly improved the efficiency of their Meta advertising.

As we implemented a strategy of targeting broader audiences due to the impact of iOS14.5, we focussed on ensuring the creative strategy was designed to engage high quality users to both build brand a deliver an efficient cost per deposit. BARK’s specialist creative team developed a strategy that targeted each of Lightyear’s customer personas with a focus on engaging and informative video content. By implementing an effective creative testing process on Meta, we were able to quickly identify the type of creative and messaging that performed best in each market, enabling us to rapidly improve cost per deposit and scale spend.

During this process we found that influencer or creator-led content proved invaluable to Lightyear’s marketing strategy. With consumers wanting a more engaging shopping experience, Influencers and creators are a relatable way to instil the virtues of the platform based on trust and recommendations from a non-biased source. This type of marketing enables Lightyear to use and build upon the existing trust and reach of an influencer’s audience leading to higher engagement from potential customers.