CASE STUDIES
Here are a few case studies that show the diversity of impactful interventions on various platforms by the Aprio team
Click on the case studies below
Absa Evolve
The challenge
- Evolve was conceived during the midst of the reassurance campaign – reassure, excite, educate - following the Barclays PLC sell down in Africa.
- Evolve issue #1 was launched in 2018 soon after the South African rebrand to Absa Group Ltd. A quarterly thought leadership magazine was distributed via email primarily to key stakeholders across the continent, including regulators, government officials, partners, large suppliers and top clients, where appropriate.
- The objective was to portray the Absa group as a thought leader on these issues and to help build the Absa brand particularly, but not exclusively, in African markets.
- The quarterly thought-leadership magazine saw nine editions mainly covering analysis, news, columns, and articles of interest about global and African trends that impact the economy and the financial services sector.
- Branding was minimal, and emphasis was always placed on the quality of the content, first.
The result
The initial circulation of issue 1 was approximately 500 and more recent issues are distributed to around 3 000. Evolve’s reach within the target audience became particularly powerful. Typically, digital newsletters or magazines might achieve an open rate of 20% of circulation, but, through Evolve’s circulation strategy, social media support and credible editorial, it consistently achieves much higher than market-average open rates – reaching much wider than its target audience. To illustrate, the last issue was circulated to 2 700, but recorded 3 500 total views. Evolve has established itself as an engaging asset in Absa’s communications arm. It outperforms digital norms by far – and it is still evolving….
2 reasons behind evolve’s runaway success
- The Evolve project was results driven and comprised far more than just a digital magazine. It gave Absa “ownership” of a credible media asset with which to talk to its large and diverse stakeholder grouping.
- An effective and solid editorial team was appointed from both Aprio and Absa to work together throughout the development of each edition and make sure the best version of Absa’s identity was put forward in every issue.
BIDVEST STRATEGY WORKSHOP
A diversified business in need of a common message
The challenge
Bidvest, as a group, is widely diversified in terms of its business offering. This has been core to its immense success over the decades. But it also results in a broad mix of distinctly different stakeholders who each need to feel heard and welcomed. Bidvest’s communications and investor relations team asked Aprio to help distil the communications message to make sure they were speaking with one voice to the many important people who make up the Bidvest community.
The final product was a tagline and clear set of messaging pillars through which the group continues to engage with its stakeholders.
The result
- Evolve was conceived during the midst of the reassurance campaign – reassure, excite, educate - following the Barclays PLC sell down in Africa.
- Evolve issue #1 was launched in 2018 soon after the South African rebrand to Absa Group Ltd. A quarterly thought leadership magazine was distributed via email primarily to key stakeholders across the continent, including regulators, government officials, partners, large suppliers and top clients, where appropriate.
- The objective was to portray the Absa group as a thought leader on these issues and to help build the Absa brand particularly, but not exclusively, in African markets.
- The quarterly thought-leadership magazine saw nine editions mainly covering analysis, news, columns, and articles of interest about global and African trends that impact the economy and the financial services sector.
- Branding was minimal, and emphasis was always placed on the quality of the content, first.
The approach
Start with the Strategy Aprio proposed a series of workshops with Bidvest’s senior decision-makers and communicators.Participants were taken through a series of examples that analysed how different global brands were balancing a diversified business offering with multiple stakeholders. From here, we established a way forward.
The Delivery
Making use of a detailed workshop, conducted by Aprio’s Alan Arguile, allowed the Bidvest and Aprio teams to identify the exact concepts that needed to be included in the group’s messaging. We undertook a top-to-bottom reassessment and health-check of the company’s values. This allowed us to jointly establish which values should take priority and which, while still important, could be considered secondary. This is often the toughest part for a leadership team to complete and having an objective third party in the room adds huge value. Aprio assessed the outcomes of the workshops and processed these to provide a complete list of positioning lines to sum-up the group’s core beliefs in a single tag line that remained true to its origins as a “proudly” South African company with global reach.
Results
Bidvest’s leadership team received great value from the strategy workshops and have used the resulting messaging in the Integrated Annual Report for the year 2021.
The report, in turn, will be used to guide messaging to a variety of key stakeholders including investors, communities, partners and suppliers, government as well as customers in the various underlying businesses.
Bidvest was awarded in the TOP 5 best market communications as well as best integrated reporting award by Intellidex.
Impala Platinum
Creation of an microsite for investors
LIVE LINK TO SITE: https://www.implats.co.za/rbplats-acquisition.php
The challenge and result
To support an M&A event within the mining industry, Aprio populated content for a dedicated microsite aimed at investors on the Impala Platinum website. The purpose of the microsite was to explain exactly why Impala had offered to acquire all the shares in Royal Bafokeng Platinum (RBPlat). The goal was to ensure that investors had quick and easy access to the various features and benefits that the transaction might bring.
CASE STUDIES
Here are a few case studies that show the diversity of impactful interventions on various platforms by the Aprio team
Click on the case studies below
Absa Evolve
The challenge
- Evolve was conceived during the midst of the reassurance campaign – reassure, excite, educate - following the Barclays PLC sell down in Africa.
- Evolve issue #1 was launched in 2018 soon after the South African rebrand to Absa Group Ltd. A quarterly thought leadership magazine was distributed via email primarily to key stakeholders across the continent, including regulators, government officials, partners, large suppliers and top clients, where appropriate.
- The objective was to portray the Absa group as a thought leader on these issues and to help build the Absa brand particularly, but not exclusively, in African markets.
- The quarterly thought-leadership magazine saw nine editions mainly covering analysis, news, columns, and articles of interest about global and African trends that impact the economy and the financial services sector.
- Branding was minimal, and emphasis was always placed on the quality of the content, first.
The result
The initial circulation of issue 1 was approximately 500 and more recent issues are distributed to around 3 000. Evolve’s reach within the target audience became particularly powerful. Typically, digital newsletters or magazines might achieve an open rate of 20% of circulation, but, through Evolve’s circulation strategy, social media support and credible editorial, it consistently achieves much higher than market-average open rates – reaching much wider than its target audience. To illustrate, the last issue was circulated to 2 700, but recorded 3 500 total views. Evolve has established itself as an engaging asset in Absa’s communications arm. It outperforms digital norms by far – and it is still evolving….
2 reasons behind evolve’s runaway success
- The Evolve project was results driven and comprised far more than just a digital magazine. It gave Absa “ownership” of a credible media asset with which to talk to its large and diverse stakeholder grouping.
- An effective and solid editorial team was appointed from both Aprio and Absa to work together throughout the development of each edition and make sure the best version of Absa’s identity was put forward in every issue.
BIDVEST STRATEGY WORKSHOP
A diversified business in need of a common message
The challenge
Bidvest, as a group, is widely diversified in terms of its business offering. This has been core to its immense success over the decades. But it also results in a broad mix of distinctly different stakeholders who each need to feel heard and welcomed. Bidvest’s communications and investor relations team asked Aprio to help distil the communications message to make sure they were speaking with one voice to the many important people who make up the Bidvest community.
The final product was a tagline and clear set of messaging pillars through which the group continues to engage with its stakeholders.
The result
- Evolve was conceived during the midst of the reassurance campaign – reassure, excite, educate - following the Barclays PLC sell down in Africa.
- Evolve issue #1 was launched in 2018 soon after the South African rebrand to Absa Group Ltd. A quarterly thought leadership magazine was distributed via email primarily to key stakeholders across the continent, including regulators, government officials, partners, large suppliers and top clients, where appropriate.
- The objective was to portray the Absa group as a thought leader on these issues and to help build the Absa brand particularly, but not exclusively, in African markets.
- The quarterly thought-leadership magazine saw nine editions mainly covering analysis, news, columns, and articles of interest about global and African trends that impact the economy and the financial services sector.
- Branding was minimal, and emphasis was always placed on the quality of the content, first.
The approach
Start with the Strategy Aprio proposed a series of workshops with Bidvest’s senior decision-makers and communicators.Participants were taken through a series of examples that analysed how different global brands were balancing a diversified business offering with multiple stakeholders. From here, we established a way forward.
The Delivery
Making use of a detailed workshop, conducted by Aprio’s Alan Arguile, allowed the Bidvest and Aprio teams to identify the exact concepts that needed to be included in the group’s messaging. We undertook a top-to-bottom reassessment and health-check of the company’s values. This allowed us to jointly establish which values should take priority and which, while still important, could be considered secondary. This is often the toughest part for a leadership team to complete and having an objective third party in the room adds huge value. Aprio assessed the outcomes of the workshops and processed these to provide a complete list of positioning lines to sum-up the group’s core beliefs in a single tag line that remained true to its origins as a “proudly” South African company with global reach.
Results
Bidvest’s leadership team received great value from the strategy workshops and have used the resulting messaging in the Integrated Annual Report for the year 2021.
The report, in turn, will be used to guide messaging to a variety of key stakeholders including investors, communities, partners and suppliers, government as well as customers in the various underlying businesses.
Bidvest was awarded in the TOP 5 best market communications as well as best integrated reporting award by Intellidex.
Impala Platinum
Creation of an microsite for investors
LIVE LINK TO SITE: https://www.implats.co.za/rbplats-acquisition.php
The challenge and result
To support an M&A event within the mining industry, Aprio populated content for a dedicated microsite aimed at investors on the Impala Platinum website. The purpose of the microsite was to explain exactly why Impala had offered to acquire all the shares in Royal Bafokeng Platinum (RBPlat). The goal was to ensure that investors had quick and easy access to the various features and benefits that the transaction might bring.
Capital Appreciation
Using LinkedIn for Effective Thought Leadership
The challenge
To position CAPPREC’s top brass as tech savvy thought leaders in Fintech Aprio was asked to help position Capital Appreciation’s leadership team, as well as the leaders of each of its underlying investments, as the 'go to’ thought leaders on all things Fintech related, while creating a solid online platform on which to do this.
As one of Africa’s first Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs), the company’s mandate is to seek out investments with high growth potential and invest in them quickly. It has created a solid reputation through unparalleled investment growth in the Fintech space – with companies like Synthesis, DashPay and African Resonance under its banner.
But they needed to more confidently share this credibility with the market and demonstrate how they have a finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the fintech and payments space.
Results
Setting up a stringent editorial and content creation process paid off and we were able to generate an increase in engagement of over 2000% from 70 pieces of top-notch content. This also attracted new audiences, boosting overall followers by 300%, with nearly 30% of new visitors each month coming from the UK, Europe and North America – CAPPREC’s target market for new investment:
Results in numbers
- >300% organic growth in follower numbers
- 3 in 4 New global visitors were from the
UK, Europe and the US - 2000% engagement
- 70+ pieces of thought leadership content created
Global investors
A snapshot of new visitors in September 2021 showed that 60% of the visitors to the Capital Appreciation LinkedIn Page were from SA, while 28% were from the UK and Europe, a further 10% came from Asia and 2% were from North America.
Of the global audience
Three out of four new visitors (75%) came from Europe or North America, while 1 in 4 were from Asia. This demonstrated to Capital Appreciation that there was in fact significant appetite among global investors to find out more about what the company was invested in, in Africa.
An additional ask
To help unpack Africa and Fintech, to the global investment audience, on LinkedIn
We were tasked with creating a steady drumbeat of high-quality content that would resonate with stakeholders and would demonstrate to investors, the insight and understanding of the issues surrounding Fintech investment, as well as the unique challenges and opportunities in Africa. Attract a more global audience to the Group’s LinkedIn page.
Why LINKEDIN?
- 73% of High-Net-Worth Investors who use social media to research and make financial decisions, use LinkedIn to make these decisions.
- Investors are 65% more likely to value financial content and information found on LinkedIn compared to other social platforms.
The strategy
We partnered with Capital Appreciation’s underlying investment Synthesis to co-create a unique online marketing approach, blending organic and paid content into a seamless strategy to shape the right audience. Then, we tapped the views and insights from leaders from across Capital Appreciation’s investments – companies like Synthesis, Dash Pay, and African Resonance – to develop short audio Q&A and long-form articles focused on trending Fintech topics. During the company’s Financial Results period we created content to show of the best side of the year that was, and clearly demonstrate the heart of the strategy for the year ahead. Using LinkedIn as a platform to invite new investors to the results call.