Q&A: FP meets the marketer responsible for Ireland’s FDI

A foreign direct investment marketer is tasked with building trust, crafting perceptions, and establishing relationships with a wide audience. Aimee Stewart, head of global marketing at IDA Ireland, faces the challenge…

Financial Promoter: What are the biggest marketing challenges in FDI?

Amiee Stewart: A challenge we face is tailoring our messaging to drill down into the pain points for each particular audience – we have to be very specific and cannot broad brush financial services or different regions.

We find vastly different behaviours across the globe, particularly on digital consumption habits in different markets. On the East Coast of America in particular, we find a high affinity with Ireland due to the large Irish-American community there, meaning it’s an easier job to enter the conversation on FDI. In Asia, however, the conversation is completely different. Even within a specific sector within a city, a very different story needs to be relayed to the prospect depending on their pain points.

When targeting different audiences, we determine whether we need to talk about our geographic location, tell our talent story, or point out our commitment to the EU or connectivity to other markets. We also have really long sales cycles – ranging from two to ten years. Long sales cycles mean we’re providing information along that sales cycle – along that funnel – that can be really nuanced. We have to be responsive to the needs of each specific prospect as we go through that journey.

FP: How do you attract and retain clients?

AS: In Ireland, we have 20 of the top 25 global financial services institutions, spanning across asset management, aviation, leasing, payments, FinTech, insurance. Some of the reasons for our success are we’re committed to the EU, we’re English speaking, and we’re a common law jurisdiction. A key part of our success comes from the companies that are here – a third of our companies have been with us for over 20 years, and that tells the story.

Our strong relationships with existing clients help us build that ecosystem. If organisations in financial services are looking to come into Dublin, or those in med-tech to Galway, there’s already an ecosystem of all their peers and the support functions are set up. Success builds success.

LinkedIn is absolutely critical in our social strategy. We’re looking to target decision makers across the knowledge economy, and from what we can see they’re on LinkedIn daily. We do some targeted LinkedIn campaigns that give us access to X number of C-suite professionals in a variety of sectors. We utilise hyper-targeted sector messaging through paid ads that draw users back to our website. We’re also looking to experiment with lead gen formats this year.

FP: How do you measure success?

AS: Whenever we have a significant investment in a campaign, we always put a measurement element in place, such as a brand uplift study. While marketing metrics are great, it’s much more beneficial to get insight from a test audience and report back to the board about how we’ve moved the dial from a brand perspective.

We can measure reach or click-through rates, but our task as marketers is converting those metrics. In a sales cycle of, say, five years, conversion becomes tricky to measure. It’s great for people to watch your video, but it’s a difficult task to get the board interested in video views. If you can look at the brand uplift study, however, you can prove that those who engaged with the video say they’re more likely to consider Ireland as a place to invest in.

In an environment where you’re looking for increased budgets, or at least to maintain them, marketers need to have those hard evidence points when competing with someone from another division who has data to talk about.

Through brand uplift studies, we are able to measure how our audience perceive us. In one particular study, “trustworthy” was the number one adjective used by those who engaged with that content. It’s only a subset of those who consume the content, but we can tell that what we’re doing is effective and we’re writing the right kind of content for the right audience.