Using Integrated Media to Position Financial Services Company As Industry Thought Leader

Brief

Coegi’s financial services client wanted to use content marketing to establish themselves as a marketplace leader by growing brand presence alongside a competitive landscape and providing value to financial professionals and consumers through retirement planning content that educates, supports, and inspires action. 

To accomplish this, Coegi and the financial services firm strategized to establish a B2B2C content strategy focused on reaching both financial professionals and retirement-aged consumers through partnerships with well-known publications.

Highlights

17.8
Million Impressions

188,000
Clicks

110,000
Total Engagements

Challenge

The brand leverages a B2B2C model. While the majority of their objectives focus on targeting financial audiences, it is also important to increase brand awareness with consumers to aid in the sale of their products.

Their primary national advertising objectives are twofold:

1. Brand Awareness – Increasing awareness of the corporate brand across consumer, financial professional, and prospective retail audiences. 
   • Extending their brand promise and messaging into the B2B space
2. Thought Leadership – Establishing brand recognition and trust among financial professionals and consumers 

The brand had an opportunity to increase brand awareness with consumers. The data showed that unless they were already customers, consumers were less familiar with the brand. The consumers that did know the financial services firm believed their key differentiators were their ability to grow their investment and provide competitive fees. But there were bigger issues at hand:

1. Consumers were still learning about annuities in general and, therefore, were difficult to convert into purchasers
2. Financial professionals were not frequently recommending annuities, including the client’s

Solution

Partnering with the brand, we focused on the following key areas to help gain market share:

• Helping change financial professionals’ perspectives about the value of annuities 
• Positioning the brand as a trusted leader in the annuity space
• Explaining how the brand’s solutions can provide value within a sound financial plan and, in turn, how it will help the financial professional grow their business

Based on the brand’s content calendar, the teams assembled a smart strategy to show Coegi would use content marketing partnerships and advertising to help raise their market share by slightly over 1%:

1. In a traditional advertising driven industry, we would lean harder into digital channels to keep up with innovation, connect with users, and build a data-driven strategy that would differentiate them from competitors.
   
2. We would focus these dollars to more cost efficient and effective channels that align to a digitally-minded consumer.
   
3. We would work alongside established publishers to continue to build its digital presence and opportunity via a content strategy that would solidify their position as an industry thought leader.

Choosing digital content partnerships required an exercise of evaluating: audience, content quality, distribution, reach and value. This analysis pointed to these front runners: Kiplinger, Investment News, Bloomberg and Barron’s. The goal was to maximize reach with large publications (Barron’s & Bloomberg) while maximizing engagement with niche publications (Investment News & Kiplinger), authentically aligning the publisher’s editorial content with the brand’s subject matter experts. 

Results

Across four publishers and twelve pieces of content, the campaign generated a total of 17.8 million impressions, 188,000 clicks, and 110,000 total engagements from October – December 2022. Niche publications like Investment News and Kiplinger had the highest engagement rates, both publications reaching an average time on page of over 4:00, while larger publications like Bloomberg and Barron’s garnered the largest reach, with 10M and 15.4M unique views respectively. Consumers resonated with a more indirect approach to annuities by tying content to timely, relevant topics such as women and the recession, while financial professionals resonated with a more direct approach. Coegi extended content reach across platforms by layering programmatic and social campaigns, accounting for 28% of overall impressions.

The Kiplinger content piece “How to Get Retirement Income You Can Count on for Life” had the highest page views (24,516) and longest average time on page (4:39), indicating the importance of applying statistical research in a relevant, easy-to-digest format. Investment News podcasts garnered an average of over 1,000 downloads, on par with their engagement benchmark for Retirement Repair Shop, and “Demographics & the Coming Retirement Crisis” had the most downloads with a final count of 2,184, exceeding the benchmark by 118%. 

Bloomberg exceeded their contracted content impressions by 26%, and shorter, snackable content performed better on publications with high reach and numerous sponsored placements. The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s content “Psychology of Retirement Planning” program delivered 43,000 page views, exceeding the page view goal by almost 40%, while “Retirement Uncertainty” resonated with financial professionals and high net worth individuals, resulting in strong engagement as users spent 40% more time than average.

Key Takeaways

Through data-driven media and targeting recommendations, relevant content partnerships, and innovative thinking, this campaign was able to reach the target audiences in authentic environments by providing educational and informative content. This success was driven in part by tailoring content to different audiences and platforms, and applying statistical research in a relevant, easy-to-digest format. As the partnership between Coegi and the financial services brand continues, we will no doubt continue to see impressive results and strive to keep finding innovative solutions to enhance the traditional financial services advertising model.