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Eastspring: Investing for millennials

Client: Eastspring Investments

Project Title: InsightsOut

BACKGROUND

Financial planning isn’t the most engaging topic. It’s typically dry and jargon-ridden. The very nature of finance can be intimidating, especially to the younger generation who may not be well-versed in investing, have minimal knowledge of financial products, or just aren’t interested.

The issue is, if you want to ensure your financial future, you need to make investment decisions early on.

BRIEF

Millennials make up almost 30% of the world’s population and almost 60% of them live in Asia — Eastspring Investments’ main market. Eastspring Investments needed to set itself apart from the competition to engage this lucrative and growing market. The investment company looked for a way to target millennials and encourage them to explore their products and begin their investment journey.

RESPONSE

InsightsOut is an ongoing series of short, light-hearted articles that aim to:

  1. Engage millennials on little known facts and trends and how they relate to investing
  2. Increase millennials’ awareness of Eastspring Investments as an investment company and of its investment capabilities
  3. Encourage millennials to begin investing and help them stay informed along their investment journey

For Eastspring Investments, going against the grain was the best way to stand out. The InsightsOut articles defy the typical jargon-ridden, complex, hard-to-read norm of finance articles. Written in an informal tone, they illustrate how little-known trends or facts relate to investing. This makes the information easy to digest, appealing, and fun for the target audience.

For example, cartoon characters Timon and Pumbaa are used to depict two different types of investors, and what can be learned about behavioural biases.

48 articles targeted at millennials in the Asia Pacific region as well as specific countries like China, Japan and India were written across 6 themes. These themes included food, innovation, behavioural finance, sustainability and millennial-related trivia.

To ditch the boring and dry stereotype of finance-related articles, attention-grabbing headlines and cartoon-like visuals were created for each article to appear friendly and eye-catching on Facebook. The visuals provided consistency with the brand’s image as each includes Eastspring Investments’ signature texture pattern.

Published weekly on the InsightsOut website, a short 2.5 month paid campaign was initially used to promote articles via programmatic, social (Facebook, LinkedIn) and content amplification (Outbrain, Yahoo Native) platforms.

Following that, articles were promoted across Eastspring Investments owned and partner (Prudential) channels like websites, social media, email and offline promotion at events.

What started out as a pilot, InsightsOut continues today as part of the company’s commitment to raise awareness of trends and investing among millennials through consumer-styled content.

OUTCOME

The paid campaign saw more than 14.5 million impressions overall, with a unique user reach of 913,248. It also saw a click-through rate of 0.43% which was almost double the targeted benchmark rate of 0.25%.

The campaign drove a total of 62,900 clicks to the site, which saw over 30,000 unique visitors during the campaign period. It was seen as successful since a subset of these unique visitors visited the “About Us” page to know more about Eastspring Investments, thus increasing awareness.

As expected of social media channels among the digitally savvy millennials, Facebook saw the greatest reach among all channels during the campaign.

Fund Selector Asia, an investment news and analysis site even mentioned InsightsOut in one of its weekly Spy features.

InsightsOut is a fresh take among content hubs of the finance industry and is the perfect example of innovation in the content marketing space. It breaks through stereotypes of finance articles being hard-to-digest and shows how complex information can be presented in a new way to be easily consumed by the masses.

The campaign has also shown merit in expanding Eastspring Investments’ reach across the Asia Pacific region, as it has been successfully adopted in Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand so far. Millennials are clearly eager to lap up information that is presented in a consumer styled way, which is unique in the field of finance.

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