In this challenging economic climate, entrepreneurs find it difficult to get the support of their bank. What’s more, our competitor KBC communicated massively to our target: entrepreneurs of small businesses.

How can we prove that BNP Paribas Fortis supports local businesses? And how can we create sympathy for the brand?

By demonstrating that our support goes far beyond finances. We fully support entrepreneurs to reach their business goals; their project is our project.

We gave away our advertising space on the shirts of the most successful soccer team in Belgium. The winner of our online contest has his company logo displayed on the shirts of RSCA Anderlecht during an official league match. To the seven companies with the most votes, we also offer a local advertising campaign. On our campaign website, we provide a personalized pack for self-promotion, in order to encourage the voting for the entrepreneur’s business.

ATL-media to boost awareness about the contest: TV commercial, radio, print, OOH.

Digital channels: video, display banner, SEA, emailing, social media, e-buzzing, a targetable blog network that creates legitimacy amongst the target to created awareness and built a qualitative audience.

Then, we communicated with a targeted display and social data driven approach. Banners for the public encouraged voting, banners for participating entrepreneurs proposed to involve their own network.

The winning business gets its logo on the shirts during an official league match and covered on TV. To the seven companies with the most votes, we also offered local advertising campaigns.

- 1.027 participants

- over 50.000 votes

-192.265 unique website visitors

- 827.496 page views

- 215.427 views on YouTube

- 3.760 shares of the campaign website on social

- 43.542 posts/shares/comments on Facebook.

But most of all, 62% of our target audience thinks of us as an entrepreneurs’ bank supporting local economy.

On top of that some entrepreneurs didn’t hesitate to buy advertising space on Facebook, or to develop a promotion or contest to boost the votes for their case. In the end, we didn’t have to prove we are the bank for entrepreneurs, they were proving it themselves.