Digital Wallets Were Scaling Fast. Palawan’s Branch Advantage Needed a Digital Strategy.

Palawan Pawnshop – Palawan Express Pera Padala remained highly recognized among traditional pawnshop and remittance competitors. The competitive pressure had shifted, however. Digital wallets were building much stronger search interest and expanding access to financial services through mobile platforms.

Palawan needed to keep its services relevant to customers who wanted digital convenience without losing sight of the people who still relied on cash and physical branches, particularly outside major urban centers.

The paid media challenge was equally specific: improve relevance across a mass national audience, support domestic and international remittance campaigns, and give the team enough control to manage performance by region instead of treating the Philippines as one homogeneous market.

A Philippine financial-services brand offering pawn brokering, domestic and international remittance, bills payment, insurance, foreign exchange, electronic reloading, and the PalawanPay mobile wallet.

Industry: Financial Services / Pawnshop / Remittance / E-wallet

Location: Philippines

Services: Performance Marketing, Paid Media Strategy, Audience Research, Media Planning and Buying, Campaign Analytics and Measurement

The Results

The Media Plan Stopped Treating the Philippines as One Audience

Customer Research and Landscape Audits

We began by combining performance data with customer evidence. Search trends and campaign analytics showed how digital wallets were gaining attention, while social listening and message mining revealed what Palawan customers still valued. Offline feedback added another layer: the brand’s branch network remained a practical advantage for customers who depended on cash transactions or lived outside major urban centers.

The team translated those findings into a measurement model that connected business goals with funnel objectives, campaign KPIs, and audience segments. Paid media initially focused on building awareness and qualified traffic, giving each campaign a defined role instead of optimizing every channel toward the same outcome.

Conversion Targeting Prioritization

On Meta, Propelrr® built custom audiences from people reached through earlier awareness and engagement activity. Conversion targeting prioritized these first-party engagement pools over broad lookalikes, allowing creative and delivery decisions to reflect the behavior of domestic and international remittance users.

Region-specific Digital Advertising Campaigns

The campaign structure then shifted from one nationwide setup to separate programs for Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. Regional language and locally relevant messages made the PALA-PARAAN and WIN-WIN campaigns more specific to the communities they served. International remittance campaigns also separated sender markets by country and matched the creative with relevant transfer partners and recipient locations in the Philippines.

This structure gave the team more control over regional CPCs, CPAs, and budget allocation. More importantly, it connected Palawan’s strongest brand advantage, its accessible branch network, with the way each audience encountered the campaign. The result was broader delivery without flattening different markets into one generic national message.