If someone can’t buy your product, why would you spend money advertising to them?
Over a year ago, I asked why a workplace pension scheme would spend money advertising to people who couldn’t directly choose it. https://lnkd.in/p/eUk-PvPV
I’d seen The People’s Pension’s outdoor advertising and Nest’s animation and was musing over the thinking behind them.
The employer chooses the scheme. Employees get enrolled. Wouldn’t you spend your marketing budget reaching the people making that decision?
With Nest, The People’s Pension and Smart all advertising to members, it’s worth coming back to. Because my initial reaction was looking at a very narrow part of the relationship.
Who signs the contract matters. So do the people who influence that decision, the people that save and ultimately decide whether to pay it any attention. Ever!
Enrolled doesn’t mean engaged
Auto-enrolment gets people into a pension, but not automatically interested in it.
But we send emails asking them to log in, check something or make a decision, and we’re surprised when they don’t.
When you look it at like that… building familiarity when you need someone to act starts to look fairly sensible.
Could advertising make a member more likely to recognise their provider, open a communication or take an interest in their savings? Possibly. Could it also help an employer or adviser feel more familiar with the business when its name comes up? Quite possibly. People don’t stop being employers or advisers when they leave the office.
I don’t know the objectives or results behind any of these campaigns, so I’m not declaring them a success. But judging them solely on whether the person seeing the advert can buy directly misses the point.
Who have you put in the customer box?
If a company is looking to change pension providers… HR might identify the need. Finance will definitely want to see (and agree) any costs involved. Procurement gets involved. Payroll will wants to understand any data implications. Employees will actually own it.
And each audience will have different questions… yet we’ll happily dump all those audiences into the employer bucket and send them all the same presentation.
Your enthusiastic contact still needs help
There’s another trap… your potential customer is (probably) more than the person you’re speaking to. They might like the idea, can see the benefit and the meeting went well. Lovely.
Then nothing happens.
Perhaps they don’t control the budget. They’ve had push back from a colleague, or there’s no resource to put this into project.
Understanding those barriers is part of marketing. So is giving your contact something useful to take into the conversations you won’t be in. You need to support the whole funnel.
What about the end user?
Equally, concentrating entirely on the purchaser alone creates its own problems.
That’s why member research matters even when members aren’t choosing the scheme. And why reaching them can be a legitimate marketing objective in its own right.
Obviously – you’d want a clear purpose. If the aim is recognition, measure whether recognition improves. If it’s getting people to check their pension, look at whether that happens. A memorable advert doesn’t automatically mean a more engaged member… unless you know what you want them to do and can track it.
So who’s your marketing for?
Before briefing the next campaign, take a proper look at who pays, who decides, who influences… then think about what matters to them, what are their motivators and barriers. Have they got a reason to care?
That’s where I’ve landed on the workplace pension adverts. Someone doesn’t have to be able to buy from you to be worth reaching.
But you should be able to explain why you’re spending money reaching them.
Karen Quinn, Co-founder, Untamed Consulting
