When you’re tweeting, the last thing you’re thinking about is your retirement fund. But that was precisely why insurance provider Voya Financial used Twitter for an ongoing brand campaign.
Voya’s goal was to introduce its new brand – the company had been renamed in April after it spun off from Dutch bank ING Groep and debuted on the New York Stock Exchange. Consequently, Voya invested in paid media, both online and on television said company CMO Ann Glover.
“When we said goodbye to the ING name, we had to go above and beyond to drive awareness,” said Glover. “Beyond the overarching awareness goal, we also aimed to connect our brand to retirement in people’s minds.”
Thus, Voya looked to Twitter for the brand awareness the platform promised. Despite Twitter’s ongoing developments in direct response and lead-generation, some of its ad products such as Promoted Trends and Twitter Amplify are more conducive to the upper-funnel demands (and budgets – Promoted Trends cost, on average, $200,000 a day) of a public company like Voya.
National Save for Retirement Week, an unofficial holiday in the banking and finance community, provided a hook for Voya to kick off a campaign it called Born To Save. To promote retirement readiness, Voya offered to give each baby (or technically, their caregivers) born on Oct. 20 a $500 jumpstart on retirement savings via a mutual fund.
Voya supported the promotion with a Promoted Trend on Twitter, which Glover described as “the biggest social initiative throughout the campaign.” The primary goal was to drive impressions to a Born To Save microsite Voya had built to offload any traffic it drove from Twitter.
One Promoted Trend with the #BornToSave hashtag resulted in 56.5 million impressions within 24 hours, with 2.35 million click-throughs to Voya promoted content. To further drum up engagement with the Twitter Promoted Trend, Voya simultaneously sponsored a paid segment on Good Morning America when it attached its branding to pop news through Twitter Amplify.
The combination of the broadcast amplification in the Twitter stream and the Promoted Trend has resulted in a 20% redemption rate to date for Voya’s $500-stocked mutual fund.
“We wanted the content to deliver a high level of engagement,” said Glover. “In particular, two of our posts featured fill-in-the blank questions that tapped into the emotion of having a baby and outperformed any of the posts we’ve ever run on our social channels.” The most successful of the two resulted in 2,900 comments, 600-plus shares and 36,000 likes on Facebook alone.
Glover said Voya expects to continue its investment in Twitter because of its ability to engage an audience in-the-moment. Twitter Amplify deals are particularly enticing since the brand can “ride along” with partner content that extends beyond its own identified audience target.
“Because conversation about television shows is consistently one of the most active daily topics of discussion on social, Twitter (is our chosen) integration platform,” she added. “We aim for the conversation to continue on social after (TV) segments conclude using a consistent hashtag. This integration keeps users engaged past the on-air segment and reaches the audience across channels.”
