There is a Turkish wedding tradition where friends and family attach gold and cash on the bride & groom's dresses. And when they come home from the wedding, there's one big question: What to do with them? Akbank, one of Turkey’s leading banks, hoping to gain the business of and help the newlyweds on the start of their journey, turned this into an opportunity. To attract more clients –specifically newlyweds with all the gifted gold in hand– for Akbank Investment Services, we had to show ourselves directly to our prospective clients.

During wedding season, we created 1000+ personalized videos addressing the brides and grooms, and injected them into relevant “wedding hashtags” created on Instagram. The idea is to show our video to the couple without spending a dime, while they’re checking out their wedding photos after the event. We used all possible hashtags for a given couple to maximize our chances of exposure; if the video was addressed to Mary & John, we would use the hashtags #MaryJohn, #MaryJohnWedding #MaryAndJohnWedding, #MaryJohnWedding, #MaryJohnGettingMarried, MaryJonHappyDay etc.

To ensure our videos were seen, we had to use the right hashtags. We started by figuring out the most common names given to people, who are at the average age to get married, taking both data sets from official Turkish Statistics Institute data. By merging these “most likely to marry” female and male names, we came up with 1000+ different combinations, and created personalized videos addressing the couples. Then we gathered all the wedding hashtags we could find, to figure out which formats were most popular in Turkey. We tagged our videos with all possible combinations of said hashtags – #MaryJohn, #MaryJohnWedding … – to maximize our chance of success. The videos started with a heartfelt congratulation to the newlyweds, and ended with an invitation to call Akbank Investment Services for a free consultation, should they ever need advice on what to do with their “wedding gold”.

As explained above, we prepared 1000+ personalized videos and posted them in advance, so that they pop up among wedding pictures during wedding season. With the right hashtags, our videos appeared on countless wedding albums/hashtags on Instagram.

We have reached more than 20% of all "just married" couples in Turkey. Akbank's investment services acquired 33% more clients during the wedding season (May – September) compared to the same period of the year before.