How Pepperstone scaled its creator program across APAC and LATAM with 18m+ impressions

Situation: A global giant entering new markets as an unknown

Pepperstone is an award-winning online Forex and CFD broker that provides traders worldwide with with access to some of the best trading technology and razor-sharp spreads from 0.0 pts on Razor account. Already operating across 150 countries, the brand’s next strategic priority was growing brand awareness in five key APAC markets.

However, entering these new regions meant building the brand’s creator program largely from the ground up. Local brokers had spent years building cultural familiarity and community trust, and Pepperstone’s brand recognition in these markets was limited compared with its standing in 

Meeting two key requirements 

The brand couldn’t simply run bold promotional campaigns. It had to find a smarter way in while navigating two obstacles:

1. Perception: CFD trading was widely viewed by APAC audiences as complex, intimidating, and reserved for financial professionals rather than the everyday person. 
2. Regulations: Across the jurisdictions Pepperstone was targeting, creators couldn’t legally encourage trading directly. Every piece of content needed to meet compliance standards before publication. 

Target audience

The audience Pepperstone needed to reach wasn’t actively searching for a broker. They were:

• Finance-curious individuals and emerging traders
• Predominantly aged 25–55 (with 25–34 being the highest-value cohort)
• Spending time on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube

Reaching them required content that fit naturally into those environments, not ads that interrupted them.

Campaign objectives

Pepperstone entered the campaign with three clear goals in mind:

1. Drive measurable brand awareness and high-quality website traffic across its five target APAC markets
2. Reposition Pepperstone from a distant global broker into an approachable, trusted trading partner for emerging traders
3. Build a scalable, data-driven creator framework that could generate market intelligence and inform future campaign phases.

For Pepperstone, maintaining brand standards while preserving creator authenticity at scale, across borders, and within regulatory requirements took more than a roster of creators—it required a new infrastructure. But this scenario isn’t unique to Pepperstone: for any large brand scaling cross-border creator campaigns, the hardest problem isn’t finding creators—it’s striking the right balance between centralized brand control and an authentic local voice. Getting that balance right, not just recruiting talent, is the problem impact.com is built to solve.

About: Pepperstone

Pepperstone is a globally recognized online Forex and CFD broker built on superior trading technology.

Founded in Melbourne in 2010, the company has established itself as an enterprise-grade player in the financial services sector:

• Massive global footprint: Operates a network of 12 global offices, supports 900k+ clients in 150 countries, and processes upwards of US$350 billion in trades monthly.
• Rigorous regulatory standards: Fully regulated across multiple strict international jurisdictions, including ASIC, the FCA, CySEC, the DFSA, BaFin, and the SCB.
• Enterprise-grade security: Holds SOC 2 Type 1 certifications, confirming that its cloud controls and internal processes meet strict global benchmarks for data protection.

Solution: Building an education-first creator engine

To build a creator program infrastructure that balanced corporate control and creator freedom, Pepperstone partnered with impact.com. The team offered a dual solution—an enterprise-grade creator platform paired with an expert creator services team to execute the strategy. 

Phase 1: Launching the APAC creator campaign

Rather than relying on traditional promotional ads, impact.com’s team took a completely different approach. They built the campaign around the core truth that education converts better than promotion in financial services.

Operating as an extension of Pepperstone’s marketing arm, impact.com’s creator team designed a highly localized framework to transform complex compliance mandates into an approachable educational journey.

impact.com’s Creator Search and Marketplace tools allowed the team to vet and source creators based on geographic compliance, audience relevance, and cultural fit. This removed what would otherwise have been costly guesswork in unfamiliar markets. 

With these tools in place, Pepperstone and impact.com contracted 10 creators across a deliberate tier structure: 

• 1 macro-creator: Bryan Low (550k+ Instagram followers) was onboarded to provide a wide geographic reach and instant category credibility.
• 6 micro-creators: (19k to 57k followers) were selected to reach highly specialized, high-engagement financial communities.
• 3 nano-creators: (5.7k to 12.4k followers) were deployed for cost-efficient, deep regional market expansion where cultural proximity mattered more than follower counts.

Three executional pillars

Together, Pepperstone and impact.com briefed creators to ensure they hit three key pillars:

1. Relatable education: Creators translated trading mechanics into everyday language. Creator Kelly Lim’s framing of trading as “like shopping online” made the platform feel immediately accessible to audiences who hadn’t considered the financial market to be for them. 
2. Tangible proof: Live platform walkthroughs, real-time speed tests, and structured broker-selection criteria gave audiences concrete, verifiable reasons to choose Pepperstone. 
3. Compliant-but-effective calls to action: Language like “check it out and see if it’s the right fit for you” drove genuine intent while meeting regulatory requirements.

Full-funnel content structure

Every piece of content had a job to do based on where the audience was in their journey:

• Awareness and discovery: TikTok videos and Instagram Reels broke down technical barriers. 
• Consideration: Instagram Stories and carousels powered Q&As and educated consumers on trading.
• Purchase: Long-form YouTube videos from expert creators like Dato M. Tan and Naz provided factual proof to reassure serious prospects before opening an account. 

Centralizing compliance and performance tracking

impact.com’s Campaign Manager tool served as a centralized compliance gatekeeper, enabling creators to submit content drafts for mandatory internal review before publication. Without that workflow, manually chasing approvals across multiple regional compliance teams would have slowed campaign momentum.

Following this, impact.com’s creator services team used performance tracking and real-time dashboards to track weekly progress—segmenting performance by creator, platform, format, and geography. 

Without this constant, live visibility, the team would have been trapped in the standard financial services cycle of slow, backward-looking quarterly reviews. They would have been entirely unable to catch early underperformance or make the quick, decisive changes needed to protect their bottom line. 

Localization: Speaking the language of trust

An authentic local voice isn’t just a nice-to-have in fragmented regional markets. It’s a performance driver. Where possible, creators produced content that reflected local cultural touchpoints, trading concerns, and communication styles specific to their markets. 

Regional creators Naz and Jolyne delivered content in their native language, and the performance gap between language-native content and translated materials was significant. 

Paid amplification

impact.com secured three months of content usage rights and repurposed top-performing creator assets as paid ads across Meta and TikTok. 

When early Meta campaigns pulled a weak 0.04% click-through rate (CTR), the team pivoted to traffic-optimized campaigns—bringing Meta CTR to 6.5% and TikTok Spark Ads to 12.7%.

Optimizing weekly rather than quarterly proved to be one of the campaign’s defining advantages.

Phase 2 and global expansion: From regional test to repeatable playbook

Performance data from the initial launch directly shaped the next moves of Pepperstone’s expansion into new markets. Select APAC markets received prioritized focus as standout markets, and the 25–34-year-old female demographic, which demonstrated the highest CTR, was deliberately scaled.

Always-on client acquisition

Phase 2 transitioned seamlessly into an always-on client acquisition model. The creator roster expanded to 10+ new partners across the APAC region. 

The content strategy extended beyond pure finance into lifestyle and self-development verticals, a natural evolution as the brand established itself as part of everyday conversation, not just trading media.

The real test, though, wasn’t scaling within APAC—it was whether the framework would hold somewhere it had never run. Latin America became that proof: the same infrastructure, redeployed rather than rebuilt, on the other side of the world.

Applying the blueprint in Latin America

Entering Latin America, where Pepperstone primarily serves clients through key regional hubs, meant stepping into a market with no historical brand equity, intense competition from entrenched local and international brokers, and an entirely different regulatory playbook. 

Rather than running generic global advertising, Ainá Paiva, Affiliate Executive LATAM at Pepperstone, said the campaign centered on making trading education and Pepperstone brand awareness “more approachable through trusted local creators.”

Building a multi-platform content ecosystem

The impact.com team onboarded 10 trusted regional financial creators to act as native guides. By skipping short-term promotional hype, the campaign focused heavily on platform reliability and what makes Pepperstone different across a mix of 47 unique pieces of content:

• YouTube: Long-form, highly educational videos that mapped out the day-to-day platform experience and showed exactly how transparently the broker operates.
• Instagram (Reels & Stories): High-visibility platform walkthroughs and real-time storytelling built to drive active community interaction through comments and likes.
• TikTok: Quick, short-form educational clips focused on stripping away the intimidation factor of trading for everyday users.

The control balance: Protecting the creator’s voice

Required risk disclosures and financial messaging mandates were woven directly into creator scripts, without stripping away the authentic, engaging voice that makes creator content work in the first place.

What set this campaign apart

The same core pillars that defined the APAC campaign carried over without reinventing the wheel. Where standard financial services campaigns optimize quarterly, Pepperstone optimized weekly based on real-time data. 

Unlike many financial services campaigns that prioritize only reach or short-term acquisition, Paiva mentioned that “this campaign focused on long-term trust and authentic creator partnerships.” Creators acted as trusted community voices, helping to introduce Pepperstone in a relatable and credible way. 

The difference in outcome was not incidental: 

• Long-term trust over short-term acquisition
• Value-driven content over promotional hype
• Performance tracking that measured actual business impact, not just engagement metrics

Outcome: Proving cross-border ROI with 1.2m+ clicks and 92 conversions

Phase 1 results: Reach, traffic, and efficiency

The APAC Phase 1 campaign ran from April to September 2025. Across 46 pieces of creator content, Pepperstone and impact.com delivered exceptional results:

• Reached 972k unique users, 2.24 times its planned reach target
• Drove 18m+ total impressions, 10.6 times the original goal
• Generated 1.2m+ clicks at an average CPC of ~$0.01, 205 times the planned click volume, within a $12.3k budget
• Delivered a 3% average engagement rate—3.35 times the 0.89% financial services industry benchmark

Even before paid amplification, the organic content proved its worth. Those same 46 assets generated 1.8m+ impressions and nearly 1k site clicks. High-quality educational content drove action before a dollar was spent to push it.

Engagement and brand perception

Creator advocacy went beyond the contract:

• Bryan Low delivered 70% of total Instagram Story impressions through uncontracted bonus frames, signaling his passion in the platform.
• Sabrina Wang’s extra story frame earned 379 organic engagements and became a viral driver.

The top performers weren’t the creators with the biggest audiences. They were the ones whose content incorporated speed tests, platform walkthroughs, and relatable analogies. Education converted. Promotion did not.

Qualitative sentiment analysis confirmed the shift. Audiences described Pepperstone as “super easy,” a “great platform,” and something they’d “check out”—a meaningful shift from a distant broker to an accessible trading partner.

Phase 2 and LATAM: Proving the framework scales

Phase 2 demonstrated repeatability. Three regional creators alone generated:

• Nearly 1.3m impressions
• Close to 12k clicks
• 11k engagements mid-campaign, with an in-feed engagement rate of 2.8%

In Latin America, data tracking 8 creators and 42 pieces of content measured:

• 2.2m total impressions (nearly doubling the goal)
• 43k total clicks
• 488k total engagements
• 21% engagement rate from paid media
• 92 hard conversions, including new sign-ups and completed user profiles, translating creator traffic directly into business outcomes

The bigger takeaway

True global scale in heavily regulated industries belongs to the brands that replace promotional hype with localized, education-first creator trust—meeting strict regulatory requirements while turning that discipline into a distinct competitive advantage.

Disclaimer: Informational only, not an offer or solicitation to trade.

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