Objective
CCV Group BV is one of the most significant payment transaction companies in Europe. It supplies Terminals, Webshop and POS solutions to a diverse range of retail customers. It wanted to build awareness of its brand and drive sales across Europe.

In 2018, with a new group marketing function in place, they set out to develop a unified, inbound content marketing approach to drive awareness of CCV to a new and existing audience of retail entrepreneurs across Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands and Belgium.

The brief to the agency: “Develop an overarching content concept that works at brand level but is scalable by vertical, solution and territory. It needs to be modern, edgy, and grab attention”.

Solution
Through its research process 256 unearthed the key insight that would inspire the content strategy – CCVs customers were already feeling the impact of ‘The Amazon Effect’ – a profound shift in consumer’s buying behaviour. There’s no question from a retailers’ perspective that ‘it’s a jungle out there’.

Our research showed that some retailers are reluctant to venture into the jungle. They can’t compete with the Big Boys (like Amazon).

But through its content marketing strategy, CCV would become ‘Expedition Leader’ guiding its audience through the consumer jungle through relevant, memorable branded content.

256 brought this idea to life with a bespoke cast of vertical-specific, attention winning, animated characters.

We created a centralised tool kit of multi-lingual content assets with strong creative and smart copy lines that would work across all territories.

The key campaign asset was the eBook (delivered in French, German, Flemish, Dutch and English) with supporting landing pages, blogs (repurposed from an existing archive) and a vast suite of social and banner creative for paid amplification.

Results
With just 58% of the budget, we were able to accomplish the following:

• 6x more impressions than the objective set for the total budget.
• Ebook conversions – 50% ahead of the objective for budget spent.
• Clicks/Traffic 90% of objective for total budget (60,000 site hits across 4 local websites).

The results were not only shown in numbers however. One of the key successes of the campaign was in gaining the support of the local teams across Europe.

A kick-off session in Amsterdam saw the many stakeholders gather to pre-launch the campaign with presentations from 256 and Accuracast (the media buying agency) and the CCV Group Marketing team.

The content marketing strategy brought to life a truly ‘local’ campaign but with an overarching, unique identity that could continue to grow across verticals.
Since the first campaign was launched, additional characters have been developed as the strategy rolls out to new verticals in 2019.

Client description
CCV Group BV facilitates payment transactions for shops in Europe through its physical and digital solutions.