Work | BSI 27001 audience research

BSI

The British Standards Institute (BSI) came to us with an unusual request: Find out everything there is to know about how businesses engage with standards.

12 m

impressions

50 k

clicks

65 k

page views

The challenge

BSI wanted to really get to know their audience.

How do they find out about standards? What do they want to know about them? Which platforms are they using? Finding out the answers to these very important questions would inform the BSI marketing team’s activities – and help senior leadership shape strategy too.

The solution

The Think Tank put on its patented Thinking cap and decided to experiment with our tried-and-tested methods of communication to see the types of content and styles that resonated with BSI’s target audience of small- to medium-sized businesses.

We started by quizzing CEOs, managers and standards users to narrow down our testing, as well as external research and interviews with face-to-face survey participants. This helped us identify LinkedIn and Google Display as the most effective platforms and also highlighted some perceived barriers to entry and establish a tone of voice that would speak to smaller businesses in a way that inspired and engaged them.

Using this research, we came up with an integrated strategy – the Big Step Forward (BSF) that covered the relevant sectors and was cleverly set up to enable A/B testing of channels, imagery, messaging, content and interaction points.

The results

The first of four pilots, focusing on the data security standard ISO/IEC 27001, kicked off the wider campaign by surpassing the KPIs set and providing the BSI marketing and senior leadership teams with tons of tips and insights to inform their future activity.

SMEs loved the new, friendlier and more approachable tone and praised the assets created to lead them down the funnel and provide support and info around using and implementing standards.