AJ Bell is an award-winning financial investment platform in the UK that helps its clients not just save and invest their hard-earned money, but also helps teach them how to do so with innovative and easy to use learning applications and tools. Co-founded in 1995 by Andrew James Bell, the company has since become one of the UK’s largest investment platforms with over 542,000 customers trusting them to invest their money in financial plans ranging from ISAs and LISAs to stocks and shares and retirement pots.  

The brand prides itself on making complex money information easy to access and understand so its customers always feel taken care of and know how to plan for their financial future wisely, with ease, and in ways that works best for them and their money.  

AJ Bell approached us with a three-tiered request. The first thing they wanted from CMG was regular guidance to improve and elevate the overall marketing strategy for their brand in the form of consultancy. The second was to trust us with the complete design for a campaign surrounding one of their services called Earn and Learn. The third was to create the ads, including visuals and SEO copy for an entire new application called Dodl that helps beginner investors learn how to invest their money in various accounts to make the most out of their savings.  

Working on a complex, multi-tiered request with our small internal team of four and needing to collaborate with a large national company of hundreds required constant open communication in all directions and an ability to compromise and be flexible and transparent while adhering to strict legal compliance guidelines to ensure AJ Bell was getting the marketing boost they needed for their brand.  

We knew that from day one, we at CMG had to bring a huge amount of data, legal compliance boundaries, and specific financial-based rhetoric together to create multiple campaigns and products that were not just user-friendly and made our client happy, but also showcased AJ Bell as a leading choice for consumers with a strong, vibrant, and likeable brand personality.  

We created our visual assets with this in mind while concurrently developing a tone of voice document that would ensure that over all campaigns, copy, and products the brand voice and persona was front and centre. This allowed us to keep on track and have internal team guidance every step of the way throughout multi-faceted and complicated processes while providing our client peace of mind that we knew exactly what their brand is about and precisely what they want to get across to their prospective customers.  

The consultancy allowed our team at CMG to gain a deeper understanding of not just AJ Bell as a brand, but also get to know and broker relationships with their team so we could work collaboratively in a more meaningful and productive way. When it came time to begin the development of the Earn and Learn campaign, there was an in-built trust between the teams and in-depth knowledge of the brand that provided our internal creative team a strong foundation on which to develop and craft a finished campaign that AJ Bell was excited about and that would benefit their clients. By the time it came to developing the content for the more complex Dodl application and its ad campaign, we were able to use our experience and collaborative relationship with AJ Bell to streamline the process, bring energy and creativity to the brief, and deliver it on schedule and to compliance standards, resulting in a steady growth in consumer use as illustrated by their impressive fourth quarter stats below.   

STATS

• Q4 saw 86% YoY increase in NFCs 

• Q4 saw 71% YoY increase in account opens 

• Q4 saw 237% YoY increase in inflows and was our biggest quarter ever! 

• 47% of customers agree that the learn content helped them to start investing (895 responses)