When it comes to debit payment and peer-to-peer money transfers, Interac is not simply the dominant player in the space in Canada, it is synonymous with these services. But there’s another area where Interac can still make life easier, and that’s small-business payments.
While cheques are effectively dead to consumers, they remain at the centre of the business vendor payments process, which is slow and inefficient. “Giggers,” or micro-businesses that are often a one-person or small team operation, still use cheques and paper invoicing, which can result in cheque-chasing and unpaid work. These businesses typically have banking accounts with access to Interac products — they’re just not taking advantage of the digital tools available to them.
To seize this opportunity for change, we needed to make payment via Interac e-Transfer Request Money top of mind for giggers. Our objective was to raise awareness of Interac as a provider of innovative payment solutions to encourage a behavioural shift in small-business payments, moving them away from antiquated paper (invoices and cheques) and toward a more seamless, digital future.
Micro-business owners are used to being pitched on various financial service products, and we needed a way to cut through the clutter. We reasoned that no one understands the time and resource challenges of a small-scale entrepreneur better than another small-scale entrepreneur. Rather than be preached at, giggers would prefer to hear from others like them who are already succeeding with Interac products.
With that in mind, our strategy for the “Getting Big on the Gig” campaign centred on finding Canadian-based giggers who could share the real trials and tribulations of the gig economy, and explain how switching from traditional payments to digital solutions from Interac improved their day-to-day running of their businesses.
In order to create content for the Getting Big on the Gig, we spoke with real-life Canadian small-business owners, including a jeweller, a general contractor, a nutritionist, a home stager and an illustrator. We interviewed them at their places of work, and the resulting series of videos and articles wove key messages (for example, about the convenience, ease and speed of Interac e-Transfer) into the content organically, in the sense that the giggers’ outlooks and opinions on Interac products were their own.
We hoped our target audience would see a reflection of themselves in these everyday small businesspeople, who related their stories in simple, straightforward and terms that authentically and persuasively outlined the benefits of services such as Interac e-Transfer and Interac Request Money for their enterprises and their lives.
These assets lived at Interac Reports (newsroom.interac.ca), a newsroom dedicated to sharing our activities and perspectives on various topics relevant to our customers. Paid media amplified the content via Facebook and native advertising on Outbrain. Native ads were geo-targeted to Canadian residents and proved to be an effective tactic to draw consumers into our content.
We created Facebook video ads to engage our audience with relatable storylines that align with their life and work. Our paid campaign specifically targeted Canadians aged 21 to 64 whose interests included small business and entrepreneurship, with job titles to match.
Our results were impressive for a medium-population country like Canada (population 37 million — in other words, smaller than California). We generated around 7 million total impressions and drove 32,000 clicks to Interac Reports. Nearly 60,000 unique visitors across owned, earned and paid channels visited the site and consumed our content
