German’s are scared of failure, failure is such an enormous loss of face they would rather do nothing than fail. This is even more pronounced in the German business world as so much pride is associated with careers and professional success. As a result, Germany, despite having a more stable economy, has seen a 54% decline in new business start-ups in the last 15 years at a time when the UK has seen it INCREASE by 31%!

So we worked out a data-driven social content and touchpoint approach in three steps following the needs of our entrepreneurs:

1. Discoverability: A responsive landing page coupled with SEA & SEO measures were crucial in the initial phase.

2. Segmentation: We translated the heterogeneous target group into data segments that we could address, such as people looking for small business office space in real estate listings. In this phase, we also placed native ads on websites and in online magazines geared towards entrepreneurs.

3. Involvement: In an intricate process we vetted and selected reliable influencers who enjoyed a high standard and authentic reputation as entrepreneurs or managers who experienced failure first-hand at an earlier stage of their career. Our selected entrepreneur partners created original content, blog posts, YouTube videos and even podcasts, centering around the topic of failure and success, establishing Unitymedia as reliable partner with understanding of entrepreneurial needs.

Fortune Favours the brave! The shift of strategy was an undeniable success.

We smashed our sales target for the whole year in the first month by 35%.

Most importantly our daring media strategy and idea received engagement rates that were 85% higher than our previous traditional campaigns driving results for half the budget. In our case fortune really did favour the brave.