Showing the cost of dark-web data with Money Guru

MoneyGuru.com is a relatively new credit price comparison website, owned by specialist Fintech business, Quint Group, which focuses on personal loans, credit cards, mortgages and credit scores.

The brand is a challenger to the likes of MoneySupermarket and Compare the Market, both of which have huge exposure and brand reach, so the challenge was really on to get visibility in a crowded, restricted and highly competitive marketplace.

Whilst commercial targets were in place, the key performance indicators for our work were centred around visibility, so we required a strong campaign that could deliver huge results.

We needed creative but risk-free Content to showcase the Money Guru brand on external websites and generate high-quality backlinks. The Content Marketing and SEO teams at Evolved Search started with detailed research into industries that were relevant to the brand and sourced publications that would potentially link to a financial services website, which helped us to develop a list of key outreach targets and content ideas.

We had already delivered a number of high-performing content pieces throughout 2018, but in September/October, launched our best yet: a look into the Dark Web and the realities of personal data being sold on it, to the detriment of the everyday consumer.

This topic resonated with concerns of data security online, especially as financial services are becoming increasingly digital-centric.

The purpose of this content piece was to highlight Money Guru as a thought leader around finance, personal data and the digital landscape.  To make this campaign a success, we:

• Completed keyphrase research to unearth relevant terms that the Money Guru target audience was searching for and therefore concerned about in terms of their personal data and factored this into the overall Search strategy.
• Accessed the dark web to collect data on the cost – personal and financial – of the buying and selling of a range of data, ranging from social media and email client logins to financial data, travel, online shopping and more.  From here, we worked out the true cost of the stolen data in terms of everyday life, to really hit home how detrimental it is.
• Produced infographics per data type which was collated into a full content piece, with certain categories used for outreach to gain relevant coverage for the research. During the time this campaign was mainstream, there were a number of international disasters, including Facebook’s leak, so our Digital PR team did some newsjacking to tie in the campaign and keep it front of mind.  This approach resulted in significant coverage, including live on Fox5 in the US and a featured piece on the New York Post, as well as HuffPost, Daily Mail, The Sun, BBC, Sky News, Independent, This is Money and countless other titles.