Most advertising campaigns boil down to three objectives: build awareness, drive traffic to a website, blog, or landing page; and maximize conversion rates. We recently led a client through the process of launching a campaign that does it all.

Situation

The Washington State Department of Revenue (DOR) returns missing money to Washingtonians every day through its Unclaimed Property program. Companies that have lost contact with the owner of the assets turn the money over to the DOR–and it’s up to them to reunite this lost and forgotten money with its rightful owners. Common types of unclaimed property include:

• Bank accounts
• Insurance proceeds
• Stocks, bonds, and mutual funds
• Utility and phone company deposits
• Customer credits
• Uncashed checks–such as payroll, insurance payments, or traveler’s checks
• Safe deposit box contents

The Unclaimed Property division has returned $1.2 billion to Washingtonians, as well as Washington businesses, non-profit organizations, and municipalities. But new assets are turned over every year, which means the state currently holds over $1.4 billion waiting to be claimed. That’s where we came in.

The Department of Revenue has made it easy for people to see if they have missing funds. You just have to go to ClaimYourCash.org to search.

Our job was to help get the word out and supplement their internal efforts including postcards and locator outreach. Our advertising campaign goals were to increase awareness about the program and drive traffic to the website. We know that one in seven Washingtonians has unclaimed property, so our target audience was statewide. We led the Department of Revenue through the process of building a broad awareness and traffic-driving campaign and they increased staffing to support it. Here’s how:

Step 1: Outline your media strategy

Our recommendation for an integrated media strategy included a mix of traditional, digital, and social media working together to grow awareness, increase traffic to the website, and boost conversions through remarketing.

1. Awareness and prospecting tactics, like radio, efficiently reach the greatest population across the state.
2. Traffic-driving tactics, including digital ads and social media ads, point people to the website with an easy click-through format.
3. Remarketing tactics are implemented as first-party data metrics build, to drive users who have shown interest in the claim-submission process.

Step 2: Develop effective creative

The creative developed for this campaign took a vibrant, fun, alliterative approach and includes:

• Broadcast television and radio: Using theater of the mind, we created awareness, inspired action, and urged actions online. Radio partnerships included a mix of paid ads as well as on-air DJ interviews, including testimonials about how much money they had found themselves.

• Digital media: Using a mix of digital display ads, also known as banner ads, as well as native ads that encourage people to click through to check for unclaimed property of their own. The four unique creative units were then created in all the standard seven digital ad sizes.

• Social media: Use a mix of image and other format ads to educate and create engagement.

Step 3: Measure and optimize the campaign

By setting up a real-time dashboard that pulls in metrics from the programmatic platform, Meta, and Google Analytics, we can see the performance of the campaign—and continually optimize to improve results. We employ A/B testing as part of every campaign to identify the best performing creative units and media tactics.

In just the first three months of the campaign:

• 226,958 new users to the site – up 39% from the previous 90 days
• 30,131 claims processed – up 28% from previous year
• $26.2 million refunded – up 58% from previous year

The campaign earned Gold from the international Davey Awards, placing it in the top 10 percent of entries.