Content Marketing in Financial Services

Prudential Shows Us How it’s Done

Financial services companies have gotten a bad rap for being behind the curve in leveraging innovative marketing automation and content marketing tools and techniques. However, we’re starting to see some brilliant examples of companies in this space going way beyond what companies in bleeding-edge industries such as high tech are doing. In my last post I talked about how HSBC is leveraging LinkedIn to do some great content marketing and now I think I’ve found another finserv example that has moved the content marketing bar even higher.

Prudential was looking to change the way people thought about retirement. The average American has only put away roughly $38,000 for retirement and with people living longer than ever before, this amount won’t scratch the surface of what will be needed. Even those people who are on track to have over $500k don't realize that they won’t have enough to live their accustomed lifestyles for 20+ years once they reach retirement.

Prudential discovered that the challenge was in how people thought about retirement and the behaviors associated with those perceptions. In order to change people’s thought process on investing for retirement (and indirectly to increase interest in the investment vehicles that Prudential offers), they built The Challenge Lab.

What is The Challenge Lab? Here’s how Prudential explains it: “The Challenge Lab is a Website where we take on the human behaviors that get in the way of our financial future. To build it, we partnered with leading academic experts to help us understand why we do the things we do, and what we can do to change our behavior. Through videos, experiments, tools, expert articles and over 75 interactive pieces, the Challenge Lab has changed the national conversation about retirement and empowered people who may not know much about finance to start making a real difference in their financial futures.”

The Challenge Lab is a wonderful example of great content marketing because it satisfies these core requirements for excellent content marketing:

• Customer Focused
  • The Challenge Lab is entirely about the customer and has no mention of Prudential product
    
    
• Helpful, Informational and Educational
  • The content within the Challenge Lab helps the customer understand the very real problem they face and educates them by providing the information they need to overcome this problem in very simple terms
    
    
• Engaging, and Emotional Content
  • Prudential’s content does pull on the emotions of the customers and then the tool itself allows them to go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. Customers spend a lot of time on this site because it is so easy to just look at one more story or one more component of the site.
    
    
• Provocative
  • This site was all about being thought provoking. It was the absolute goal of the site. I think they nailed it because it got me thinking about my own retirement plans.
    
    
• The Marketing in Content Marketing
  • The top 1% of content marketers will do all the things mentioned above while setting the idea in consumer’s minds that they have a need for a product or service – without ever mentioning said products or services. Prudential does this deftly. They plant the seed in the visitor’s mind that they aren’t prepared for retirement and they need to change that. Though they never mention products or services, consumers of this content will make the logical next step and come to the conclusion that they’ll need some solid investment vehicles in order to reach their retirement goals.
    
    

So how well did it work? Allow me to paraphrase an entry from the Tomorrow Awards:
In the first month, there was a 141% increase in social mentions about Prudential and The Challenge Lab campaign, resulting in 2.4 million earned impressions on Twitter alone – a 1000% increase from the month before launch. In an article by Andrew Aziz, Director of Financial Engineering & Research at IBM Risk Analytics, Andrew had this to say about the campaign, "Prudential has demonstrated an effective ability to articulate a complex concept and make it understandable so that the average investor gains insight."

Quite the success. And it shows very clearly that companies in the financial services industry can indeed accomplish great feats of content marketing. What about your company? We’d love to hear about how you’ve been able to raise the content marketing bar within your world. Please share your awesomeness in the comments below.