HSBC Expat provides financial products and services for people living and working abroad. Eight years ago they asked us to make them famous among their key customer base of expats.
We knew that moving abroad was an emotional journey as much as a practical one. People need useful information about their new life abroad as well as a community to discuss and share their experiences with.

So we devised Expat Explorer – a content marketing and publishing campaign to position HSBC Expat as experts in expats. For eight years now we have been helping HSBC provide expats with all of the information they would need to support their journey abroad, whether they are exploring, moving or settling into a new country.

At the heart of the campaign is the Expat Explorer survey. It is the largest global survey of expats, with 22,000 respondents sharing their views of life in a different country. The annual media launch of the survey in 2015 delivered nearly 1,000 global media hits across 40 different countries.

In 2011 HSBC wanted to make this rich survey data even more accessible to expats, so it was developed into an award winning interactive hub so that expats can directly share and explore the data to see how different countries compare across a range of criteria that matter to them. It has since been nominated for a Webby award and used by over 1 million people in over 200 countries.

This was the beginning of HSBC’s online Expat hub, which now houses all of the content we create for expats, including:

  • Expat Hints and Tips, a crowd sourced platform of hints and tips about life abroad by expats, for expats. All content is curated by H+K. (winner of CIM Judge’s Grand Prix in 2014).
  • Expat findings, a range of insights and stories from the Expat Explorer survey data, analysed and written by H+K.
  • HSBC’s expat community, comprising of 38,000 twitter followers and a 23,000 Facebook fans. Community managed on a daily basis by H+K.
  • A video about Expat Life , scripted by H+K from real hints, tips and tweets from HSBC’s expat community. The video has received over 550,000 views.

The campaign continues to grow, evolve and win awards as we continue to help HSBC share informative and entertaining content with its expat community.