Awards season is here. What marketing tips can you glean from those holding the gold?
The Investment Management Education Alliance (IMEA) recently held its 28th annual STAR Awards for marketing excellence in financial services. As a proud long-time sponsor of the awards, we spoke with five winners to decipher their secret sauce — and share what other marketers can learn from their success:
What foundational insights emerged from your strategy work?
Columbia Threadneedle (Maggie McInnis, Senior Director, Product Marketing): Investor choice is critical for us. We are really focused on the investor’s goals and needs. From a strategic standpoint, it was really focusing on our differentiators, which starts with the investor and solving for a need in the marketplace and in an advisor’s book of business.
Thrivent (Willow Gerhard, Marketing Specialist): We worked with our agency to do a lot of background work and competitive studies. In the past, we’ve leaned used the tagline “We invest in potential.” So, once we decided on that tagline it was our guidepost for everything going forward.
Principal (Daniella Moiseyev, Head of RIS Content Strategy): We really want to understand nonparticipants, their decision to participate, and how to help them save for retirement. For this body of work, we found data that showed just how important auto-enrollment features were for retirement plan participants. We were surprised to find that of those employees who were not participating in the retirement plan available to them through their workplace, 59% thought that they were. That data wasn’t what we went looking for, and it was a really unique insight.
John Hancock (Kelly Sinclair, Manager, Retirement Marketing, and Laura Mazzeo, Senior Marketing Manager): We were focused on helping children lay a foundation of financial knowledge so that they’re able to make wise financial decisions as adults, including saving for retirement. We identified content from our colleagues in the Philippines who ran a similar program and were able to adapt it for our North American audience.
Franklin Templeton (Jennifer Ball, Chief Marketing Officer): A great challenge or problem is an opportunity to develop a great solution. For example, we found that clients are looking for a way to learn about private markets and alternatives that are practical and simple. Based on that input, we launched a podcast that incorporates industry experts who share key learnings for our listeners and, ultimately, our clients.
Why do you think your work stood out to the IMEA judges?
John Hancock (Kelly, Laura): Not only did we have an opportunity to create something for children, not something that we typically do, but we were able to share it with more than 20 nonprofit partners and organizations — including the city of Boston. Through this effort, we were able to provide child-friendly financial literacy to plan participants’ families and the broader community.
Columbia Threadneedle (Maggie): Team collaboration. We work closely with our digital customer experience team, which has insight into how the content should appear and what the hook should be. Then we have the investments team informing what are our competitive advantages and product looking at our competitors.
Franklin Templeton (Jennifer): We always have the directive of: Why do they care? Why do they need to know what we were telling them? We work hard to make sure we’re not wasting their time with things that aren’t relevant to them.
Principal (Daniella): We gave some very actionable outcomes for employers to consider, including what you could do to communicate with participants around open enrollment. We also suggest personalized communications so that people who think they’re enrolled, who think they’re contributing, but are not, receive a reminder email at least once a year.
Was there a major hurdle/hiccup/challenge you had to overcome? How did you solve that?
Franklin Templeton (Jennifer): There were a few times we had technology issues that we didn’t expect and data challenges we hadn’t anticipated. So, we revised our release dates to make sure that we delivered an excellent client experience. We didn’t hit our target dates exactly. But we were cognizant of making sure that we were doing the right thing for the client — delivering the best experience we could.
Thrivent (Willow): Things always take longer than you think. So, really, just giving ourselves the right amount of time was crucial — and then, if needed, prioritizing things that might be a little bit more difficult, like video.
John Hancock (Kelly, Laura): I think one of our biggest challenges was developing financial materials for children, pre-teens, and teens — not our usual audience. As we typically market to adults who are saving for retirement, this project required a shift in our thinking, how to create content in a way that would be meaningful for children at different ages to help them build that foundation over time.
Columbia Threadneedle (Maggie): For a lot of online ads, there’s a small window of time in which somebody is going to be engaging with that content. And the space is small from a real estate perspective; it is a small square that you have to fill with just the right content. So, I would say it was balancing our most powerful content with compliance.
What learnings did you bring from a previous project, or did you gain any new learnings you’ll apply to future work?
Thrivent (Willow): We’d casually talked about Connected TV (CTV) off and on for the last year. It wasn’t until we’d gotten through the whole process that we realized we didn’t have all of the licenses we needed. So I think that was a learning for us: Make sure you’ve got everything in place that you need from a licensing standpoint.
Columbia Threadneedle (Maggie): I think it’s really bringing in our sales team early, getting them comfortable with the tools, training them on use cases, making sure you have constant touch points with them, soliciting their feedback, and actually implementing their feedback is really important. At the end of the day, they must feel comfortable using it.
John Hancock (Kelly, Laura): This project helped us understand how best to deliver content to a young audience to keep them engaged. We found the video portions of our campaign to be much more popular. Going forward, we’ll definitely be creating more interactive assets for these age groups.
Any tips for marketers tinkering with award submissions?
Principal (Daniella): Think about the results you’re trying to get, and what you actually got. Think about being unique and differentiated. Tell the stories with the data that you have that may not have been seen before.
Columbia Threadneedle (Maggie): Approach it almost like a creative brief. Think about the audience that is going to be evaluating these STAR awards. Make your story come to life with words and prove your success with data.
Thrivent (Willow): I think it helps to have a lot of visual elements that you can use. Our graphic designer has come up with a template that he uses to put these presentations together. So that kind of helps inform what items we would need for the submission and then just gives it a nice cohesive branded look.
Franklin Templeton (Jennifer): Be clear on what the goals of the initiative were in the first place, then make sure in the submission process you focus on whether or not you’ve been able to achieve those objectives with measurable results. I think that’s something that tends to be well rewarded by any judging process.
John Hancock (Kelly, Laura): Submit something you’re genuinely passionate about. If you have a passion for what you’re doing, that will help it shine through.
Ready to craft award-winning content?
Imprint has more than a decade of award-winning content experience. We’d love to learn more about your organization and your goals for 2025. Please reach out to us at imprint@imprintcontent.com or fill out the contact form here — let’s talk soon!
Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity
