Reaching vulnerable customers to sound the alarm on loan sharks
Social media, content creation, consultancy and paid media
The details
Stop Loan Sharks are England’s official illegal money lending team, ran as part of Birmingham City Council. Since February 2021, we have executed a number of social media and paid advertising campaigns for Stop Loan Sharks, raising awareness of loan sharks and how to spot them as well as driving people to get in touch for confidential support.
In addition to this, we have created three social media toolkits for Stop Loan Sharks, aimed at credit unions to enable them to engage their communities in safe money management, borrowing and spending. The brief was to create a toolkit that could be accessed online and offline, including a full suite of guides, content, visual assets and advice to credit unions that they could use as an off-the-shelf product.
The strategy
We executed a strategy to reach the general public and raise awareness of loan sharks, and where people could find support, across social media, paid social and PPC. This drove exceptional returns from paid social ads where users were actively clicking through to the site and getting in touch for advice and guidance. Across all paid channels, we successfully reached 30,000 vulnerable users in need of help, directing them to the right resources and channels for support.
As part of the toolkit, we carried out industry and audience research into the sector and used this to shape how social media could benefit credit unions in response to the findings. The toolkit was launched online and we co-hosted a webinar alongside Stop Loan Sharks in partnership with ABCUL where over 60 UK credit unions attended to find out more on the toolkit. Following the launch, Stop Loan Sharks saw 1,920 users across credit unions and 460 downloads of the toolkit. With the success of this campaign, Stop Loan Sharks and ABCUL requested a further two toolkits to continue offering high-value content to credit unions.
