Marketing at Wise – behind the scenes of Paid Social

I first came across Wise during a backpacking trip through Asia, very quickly realising how tough and expensive it was to pay new friends or online vendors in local currencies. It became an integral tool throughout my travels and I was an immediate admirer. 

Fast forward two years later to 2018 and I’ve returned home, with a fresh hunger to re-enter the digital space in London, but also with a determination to join a workplace that is truly making a positive change in the world. The job description for a paid social executive at Wise was a perfect fit – a company committed to helping others, building bridges, and harnessing the power of international living. I was truly over the moon when I was offered the job.

At first I felt slightly out of my depth. My experience had always covered a broad scope of areas within the marketing landscape, but in small doses – I’d done email marketing, SEO, organic social, design, and of course paid social. Now, I was surrounded by experts in the industry and being exposed to so many valuable insights and lessons in such a short period of time, with an expectation to soon become autonomous and independent. Luckily for me, I was joining a team where mentorship was a huge priority and focus. With my team’s help, it didn’t take long to find my groove and take the reins of my role.

So, what is paid social?

Through social media, we have a unique opportunity to communicate our service directly to those who need us, through targeted ads – the ones you see on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Wise’s products help millions of people around the world, so it’s our job to reach those people and make ourselves known. Whether that’s to families sending money home to loved ones, or businesses who need to pay suppliers overseas. 

But the team’s work goes beyond just building and optimising campaigns across social platforms. It includes validating new growth opportunities on a regular basis, interpreting data at a high level to inform strategy for both our team and also the wider business. We work with our amazing creative teams to figure out how to best present and position Wise, and are always ready to spearhead wider product launches. 

On top of that, through our close relationships with a number of social platforms, we’ve been able to lead on new alphas from Facebook and run large-scale tests to improve and optimise our activity. Most recently, we conducted an incrementality test within Facebook which resulted in a public case study to showcase our success, simultaneously preparing for our launch on TikTok, which is guaranteed to come with it’s own exciting challenges, tests and fresh creative.

A little on the team…

Communicating Wise to the world is at the heart of what we do – we’re active in over 50 countries, serving ads to 80+ languages. In order to properly work with all these different markets, it’s absolutely essential to have a diverse team with global experience. Currently, Paid Social consists of six people from varying nationalities. Many of us have come from different backgrounds, like journalism, film and even law, eventually finding our way into marketing at Wise.

Over the years the team has been involved in a number of pretty awesome projects, including working with social media platforms to pilot new measurement products, launching global creative campaigns and building bespoke tools to analyse and interpret data.

We tend to work autonomously, with a great deal of trust and responsibility built into the team, but there is still a massive amount of support between us. We stay in the loop through regular catch-ups and one-on-ones with each other, and there is a strong feedback loop to ensure we’re always growing and improving our workflow. 

In the midst of a pandemic, we’ve worked to still find time to enjoy ourselves virtually, with quizzes, online games, zoom wine-tastings and some in-person hang outs whenever it was possible. I’m incredibly grateful for such an energetic team and excited for all of the projects we have lined up for the future – from launching brand new markets, to creating for TikTok . All with the goal of moving closer to our mission, and spreading the word of money without borders to the world. 

Spoiler alert – we’re hiring. If you’re passionate about driving positive change for millions of international people through social media, make sure to reach out.