Growth Marketing Consultant Case Study: 40% Pension CPL Reduction and 35% Brand Awareness Growth for a FTSE 250 Investment Platform

The Client

AJ Bell is one of the UK’s largest and most trusted investment platforms, listed on the London Stock Exchange as a FTSE 250 company. Founded in 1995 by Andy Bell and Nicholas Littlefair in Manchester, the company has grown from a small actuarial consultancy into a financial services powerhouse serving over 673,000 customers across its direct-to-consumer and adviser-facing platforms.

The platform operates under several brands — including AJ Bell (D2C), AJ Bell Investcentre (adviser market), AJ Bell Dodl (a simplified investment app), and AJ Bell Securities — offering customers access to ISAs, SIPPs, Lifetime ISAs, and a broad range of investment products. AJ Bell has been a Which? Recommended Provider for eight consecutive years (2019–2026) and manages over £108 billion in assets under administration — cementing its position as one of the most established and credible platforms in the UK retail investment market.

AJ Bell completed its IPO in November 2018 at a valuation of £675 million, making it one of the landmark UK fintech listings of that era. Its mission — to make investing easy and affordable for everyone — has driven sustained growth, with the D2C platform particularly active in expanding its customer base through brand investment and performance marketing.

The Challenge

AJ Bell brought in a fractional growth marketer during a critical new product launch phase, looking to grow its D2C customer base in the competitive pensions and investment platform market. Despite strong brand recognition, the business faced specific challenges in connecting with new audiences at scale across digital channels while maintaining cost efficiency across a complex, regulated product range.

Three interconnected problems needed solving:

• High cost per lead for pension products. Pensions are a high-value but complex product to market. Reaching the right audiences — people actively considering consolidating or opening a SIPP — required precise targeting and continuous optimisation across paid search channels including Google and Bing.

• Brand awareness gaps among new customer segments. Growing AJ Bell’s share of voice required a coordinated multi-channel financial services marketing approach — spanning social video, influencer content, and top-of-funnel brand campaigns — to reach prospective pension and ISA customers.

• Campaign efficiency across a fragmented channel mix. With performance marketing running across paid search (Google, Bing), paid social (YouTube, TikTok, Meta, LinkedIn), email, TV, and OOH — alongside influencer and UGC activity — there was a need for strategic alignment and rigorous audience segmentation to ensure every channel was working efficiently together.

Our Approach as Fractional Growth Marketer

GrowthSpin’s growth marketing consultant embedded with AJ Bell’s D2C marketing team from September 2023 to February 2024, working hands-on across paid search, paid social, and brand strategy to drive customer acquisition and engagement for the platform’s key products.

Phase 1: Paid Search Optimisation for Pension Acquisition

The first priority was driving efficiency in AJ Bell’s pension campaigns on Google and Bing. Our growth marketing consultant conducted a thorough audit of existing campaign structures, targeting parameters, and bidding strategies, identifying significant opportunities to improve audience segmentation and keyword alignment. By tightening targeting around high-intent pension-related search terms and applying data-driven audience segmentation, we reduced wasted spend and dramatically improved the quality of traffic entering the conversion funnel — directly reducing the cost per lead for pension sign-ups.

Phase 2: Multi-Channel Brand Awareness and Performance Marketing

To grow brand awareness and reach new audiences, GrowthSpin built and managed performance marketing campaigns across YouTube, TikTok, Meta, and LinkedIn. The strategy leveraged both paid media and influencer marketing — using content creators to generate UGC that felt authentic while reinforcing AJ Bell’s brand message of making investing simple and accessible. Campaigns were structured around a full-funnel model, with top-of-funnel awareness content feeding into mid and bottom-of-funnel acquisition — significantly expanding the brand’s reach among prospective customers.

Phase 3: A/B Testing and Campaign Efficiency at Scale

Across all channels, GrowthSpin implemented rigorous A/B testing frameworks — testing ad creative, audience segments, landing page variants, and bidding strategies simultaneously. This data-driven approach enabled continuous improvement of campaign performance without increasing budget. Enhanced audience segmentation ensured each customer segment received messaging and creative tailored to their specific needs and investment stage. The result was a measurable uplift in campaign efficiency across the entire media mix.

The Results

Working as an embedded fractional growth marketer across paid search, paid social, influencer, and brand campaigns, GrowthSpin delivered measurable performance improvements across AJ Bell’s most strategically important marketing objectives:

• 40% reduction in cost per lead for pensions. Through targeted paid search optimisation, GrowthSpin significantly reduced the cost to acquire each pension customer — one of AJ Bell’s highest-value product lines — making the acquisition programme substantially more efficient.

• 35% increase in brand awareness. Multi-channel performance marketing strategies — spanning LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Meta with a mix of paid media and creator/influencer content — drove a significant uplift in brand awareness among prospective customers AJ Bell was targeting for future growth.

• Enhanced campaign efficiency through data-driven segmentation and A/B testing. Systematic testing across creative, audiences, and bidding strategies — combined with rigorous segmentation — raised overall campaign performance across the entire media mix without increasing overall budget.

Key Takeaways

1. Audience segmentation is the biggest efficiency lever in financial services marketing. In a regulated market where broad targeting wastes significant budget on unqualified prospects, precise audience segmentation — matching message to intent signal — was the single biggest driver of the 40% pension CPL reduction. Financial services marketers who invest in this infrastructure see compounding returns over time.

2. UGC and influencer content can build brand trust in even the most regulated sectors. Many investors are sceptical of traditional financial advertising but respond well to authentic creator content that demystifies investing. Using influencers to generate top-of-funnel UGC drove meaningful 35% brand awareness gains without the sterility of conventional financial services advertising.

3. Even the most established brands benefit from an embedded growth marketing consultant. AJ Bell’s scale and brand strength didn’t eliminate the need for specialist growth marketing expertise. Having a fractional growth marketer embedded within the team — someone who could operate both strategically and hands-on in the accounts — delivered a level of agility and performance improvement that a pure agency relationship wouldn’t have provided.

About GrowthSpin

GrowthSpin is a London-based growth marketing studio led by Neha Divanji. We work as outsourced in-house growth marketers for funded startups and scale-ups, offering fractional growth leadership, performance marketing (Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok), and product strategy with UI/UX design.

Looking for a growth marketing consultant for your financial services brand? Book a call at growthspin.co.uk/calendar