Content strategy
Lead generation
Marketing automation
Social campaigns
Video
The brief
Uber for Business was high on our list of dream clients. And in the midst of the surreal lockdown 1.0, the dream came true. At less than five years old, we won a pitch for Uber for Business' first UK marketing initiative.
Given the uncertainty facing the UK and the world, we pitched a content and contact strategy split into three phases: the now, next and long-term. It covered short-term lockdown-aligned issues, as well as forward-looking strategies that could be implemented once the road out of lockdown became clear.
Subsequently, we were chosen to create the first ever content campaign for Uber Eats for Business. With the Rides side of the business going quiet amid the Stay at Home order, Eats had become the focus for growth. We crafted a newly relevant proposition to take to market.
An experience-first campaign curated new normal trends and offered key Uber insights. We tackled evolving employee expectations, explaining what they mean for businesses in the face of continued uncertainty.
The order was in the kitchen. It was time to prepare a campaign delivery like no other.
“We chose Don’t be Shy because we were impressed by the quality of their previous work, and more importantly, because of the strategic thinking and nuance that had gone into their proposal. We were looking for digital maturity to match our own, but were also keen to find an agency forward-thinking and flexible enough to keep our campaigns relevant during such uncertainty.”
The
Challenge
Launching Uber for Business’ first UK content marketing initiative was exhilarating enough. Add on a side of pandemic pressure and uncertainty.
It meant engaging a range of audiences across a variety of work situations, promoting propositions in a state of flux and uncertainty. A campaign launch amid new restrictions required forward-thinking and fast flexing to create and maintain authentic, relevant content.
With limited access to Uber’s Martech stack, network and channels, we’d have to work independently to create something that could be contained, built and handed over — all within a limited budget. Not your ordinary Uber offer, then. But we’re not your ordinary agency. Sign us up!
Strategy
In light of the limited budget, we created a ‘lite’ version of our usual insights process, creating persona propositions through desk research and validating these with the Uber team.
We then tucked straight into content and contact strategy, developing targeted messaging for each of our audiences. We defined a proposition framework to ensure our content and campaign approach would be tailored and relevant to roles that were seeing dramatic shifts in their day-to-day demands and long-term outlooks.
The team that Eats together is a hyper-personalised, full-funnel ‘campaign on a page’, taking the reader from insights to order, offering depth where they want it. It needed to be sympathetic to all the personas, whatever their working scenario. So we created a new content format which takes the user from top-of-funnel — issues-focused content around desk research and industry stats — to bottom-of-funnel in placing an order, all in one page.
The asset is increasingly personalised the deeper the user delves, allowing them to self-select office status and job role to receive the most relevant content:
The content the user engages with determines the email workflow they are entered into. We matched them with the most appropriate Marketo workflow, set up for lead generation along with LinkedIn content forms, all directly synced straight into Marketo for the Sales team to continue nurturing qualified leads. This provided detailed conversion information for sales enablement. Delicious!
Our novel use of budget saw us take a matrix approach to content production. Don’t be Shy planned everything, but only produced the main pillar asset.
The 20 supporting blogs that were required, we plotted, interviewed SMEs, developed synopses for, and undertook keyword research, before transferring to another agency to draft. Always flexible in this cross-agency collaboration, we led across multiple agencies while still providing content to A/B test, including LinkedIn posts.
The campaign also puts a fresh twist on an analogue technique. We spotted a creative opportunity too good to miss with Ice(olation) Breakers: a team-building card game designed to help colleagues reflect on the challenges of 2020, share stories and get talking about what their normal looks like now. (Best enjoyed with a team Uber Eats, naturally.) And the fun didn’t stop there! Our social content mirrored this gamification, with LinkedIn carousels selecting the work status to deliver the right content when they land on the page. Always keeping costs down, our creative work used Uber’s extensive brand work resources.
We tested all this on a small pot of data, before launching to a wide database following (unsurprisingly) strong performance. Just as we were about to launch, however, tougher lockdown restrictions demanded responsive, agile plan adaptations, nimbly making content changes on the fly. Luckily, having planned a campaign to cater for the uncertainty of the ever-changing Tier system, our content required minimal changes.
“I was so impressed with how easy Don't be Shy were to work with throughout the process. They're efficient and friendly communicators who made creating and reviewing this complex asset, in a turbulent period, a seamless experience.”
The result was a genuinely useful resource with relevance no matter how restrictions evolved, extensively personalised so users could continue accessing new advice from the library of content whenever and however their workplace changes. And access it, they do: it’s received over 5,000 visits from launch, with a 51% asset engagement rate and 3.5% conversion rate.
Like any good Uber Eats delivery, it’s irresistible. The campaign success was noticed by the broader business which started copying it out. Uber for Business’ Global Head of MA assigned cost to closed loop reporting which they’d never done before, while we were enlisted to support a campaign across EMEA.
After establishing trust from our strong pitch, the client’s responsiveness, shared values and ease to work with allowed us to freely experiment and devise an overall better campaign. This is all testament to the tenacity and agility of both companies, creating a new standard of B2B content that’s authentic, organic and of its time — all at a time of undeniable challenges and complexities.
It represents Don’t be Shy’s latest evolution in content and campaign strategy, tightly aligning and integrating deep insights, targeted content and go-to-market activation. We’ve ultimately proved content marketing is still worth taking up even in this late stage of its existence — if done in the right, modern way we do so well.
Uber loves their ratings, and there’s no doubt they’d confidently give us 
“Don’t be Shy nailed it. The team created a strategy that considered and catered to our key personas and their challenges at a time when their roles, wants and needs are so in flux.”
Drop us a message and we'll get in touch at a time that suits you.
Manchester. London. Anywhere. We work where our clients do, we're not picky and we've got passports to boot. But, if you're stopping by our HQ, the address you need is: Don't be Shy, 1 Stevenson Square, Manchester, M1 1DN.
