We launched the nation’s first crypto bank, (and landed its app on the top trending charts).
Opportunity
Interest in cryptocurrency soared in 2021 — Bitcoin hit an all time high, Elon Musk sent Dogecoin tumbling after an appearance on SNL, NFT sales hit $25 billion, and El Salvador became the first country to recognize Bitcoin as legal tender. Yet, issues around security, trust, and convenience in buying, selling, and storing crypto assets still kept both casual investors and high-net worth individuals away from diversifying into cryptocurrency.
Vast.bank wanted to become the first US bank to offer crypto banking — services for buying, selling, and storing crypto directly from your bank account. It would be secure, trustworthy, and as familiar as checking your account balance.
With their crypto banking app in development, Vast approached Gitwit looking for help forming the national launch strategy and campaign — from which audiences to target first, to defining core messages, establishing the crypto banking brand, and ultimately launching the app across press, paid, and organic campaigns.
Find out how this regional retail bank ended up going nationwide in less than 6 months, doubling its customer base and brushing shoulders with Chase on app store rankings.
Over the life of this campaign we would launch over 400 ad graphics with dozens of placement and copy variations, creating 28,000+ potential combinations of visual, copy, and location options.
Concepting
With the strategy in place, we began to develop campaign themes and ad concepts around the core insights from our initial research — security, ease, convenience, and trust. We wanted to create a campaign that combined the excitement and opportunity of cryptocurrency with the trust and security conveyed by a bank. The results were bold, smart, fun ads that showed crypto banking as smooth, easy, and worry-free.
Campaign Development
We were able to bring our concepts to life through intensive week-long creative cycles. Each week we concepted new ads, moved approved ads into a design/animation cycle, sent produced ads to compliance, and launched compliance approved ads. We also wrote and designed crypto banking landing pages, focused on converting users to app downloads.
In addition to a massive amount of creative assets for the paid digital campaign, we also helped assist on earned media by searching for, vetting, and suggesting a PR firm experienced in crypto. We helped onboard the PR firm, guide strategy, and align all campaign efforts.
Iteration and Optimization
This campaign was all about real-time iteration for a number of reasons. Since crypto is such a quickly developing and changing space, its governance is changing mid-flight too. Policies on the ad platforms changed multiple times throughout this campaign, forcing us to adjust both targeting and creativity.
After the initial launch of the campaign, we discovered that a handful of ads out of our 28,000 combinations were the primary drivers of conversions. We used themes from that content to continue iterating, retargeting users who responded positively to that ad content with follow-up content within the same concept.
We discovered positive correlations between ad engagement/conversions and crypto "surges." Though it's counterintuitive to buy crypto when prices are high, that's how our audience responds. Amping up our marketing efforts in real-time as a response to the price of Bitcoin surging helped us ride a massive wave of conversions and traffic.
Measurement
Throughout the launch, we kept tabs on every aspect of the campaign – from ad impressions and search volume, to website traffic, app store visits, and app downloads. We created dashboards to provide Vast.bank stakeholders with a bird’s eye view of campaign performance, while also enabling our team to gain insights quickly and optimize our strategy on the fly.
Meanwhile, we capitalized on surging crypto interest throughout November 2021, quickly allocating budget to high-performing App Store search ads and sending Vast Crypto to #38 on the finance app leaderboards.