A strategic, insight-led campaign that delivered transformational percentage growth earning Route the award for Best Professional & Financial Services Campaign at the Prolific North Marketing awards 2025.
The Challenge
Darlington Building Society launched its online savings platform to new members in 2024, with the ambition to significantly accelerate digital growth while maintaining its long-standing community identity. While existing members had access prior to 2024, the wider rollout marked a major step-change in the Society’s digital proposition. With high-street banks continuing to close branches, the Society needed to compete with national providers, attract new savers, and raise digital visibility across its regional footprint.
When Route began work, online savings performance was steady but modest. The Society set a challenging new target requiring a +525% increase in online deposit growth to be achieved with a modest marketing budget and within a short timeframe. Maintaining strong in-branch engagement alongside this new digital push was essential.
Our Solution
Route developed a multi-layered digital acquisition strategy designed to broaden the Society’s reach, elevate its community positioning, and ensure cost-efficient growth across every touchpoint.
Audience Segmentation
Using audience, media and CACI insight, we identified three high-value groups:
- 55+ savers seeking stability
- Families saving for children or future milestones
- Under-30s building early saving habits
Hyper-Local Targeting
Digital activity was concentrated around branch communities, ensuring the Society’s regional identity remained at the heart of the campaign. This approach also supported in-branch engagement at a time when high-street presence across the sector was shrinking.
Integrated Multi-Channel Delivery
We executed the strategy across the following channels:
- Digital Display for brand trust and awareness
- Paid Social with demographic-specific messaging
- Paid Search capturing high-intent savers researching competitive rates
- Retargeting converting warm, engaged audiences
Insight-Driven Optimisation
Live data informed continual refinement:
- 65+ mobile users emerged as the most responsive segment
- Product-led creative outperformed brand-only messaging for account openings, and became the primary driver of conversions
- Google Analytics event tracking provided full attribution to online applications and branch referrals
This allowed us to scale what worked, remove inefficiency, and continually increase conversion performance.
The Results
The campaign significantly exceeded its objectives, delivering exceptional percentage-based growth and earning award recognition for Route’s strategic and commercial effectiveness.
Performance Highlights
- Branch-radius targeting strengthened in-branch engagement, with measurable increases in visits and enquiries across Stockton, Northallerton and Bishop Auckland.
- Delivered transformational online savings growth by Q2
- Between September 2024 and June 2025, paid activity delivered a ROAS of 1 : 1,182, maximising every pound invested.
- The Society achieved a Top 10 UK digital performance ranking (Clickthrough, 2025)
- Route received award recognition for the outcomes delivered through this campaign
Outcome
This project demonstrated how Route’s insight-driven strategy, regional-first planning, and hyper-local execution can help a community-focused financial provider outperform national competitors. The work delivered exponential digital growth while reinforcing Darlington Building Society’s role as a trusted, values-led regional mutual.