Benefit of benefits – positioning financial services in B2B environment

This content is brought to you by Liberty Corporate*

By Sandile Xaso*

In 2016, buzzwords are ubiquitous, terms like vertical digital integration, block chain technologies, big data, internet of things, portfolio diversification, programmatic buying thrown around with reckless abandon. Every industry from tech, journalism and advertising is now flush with these impressive sounding words.

Financial services are no different, with a bewildering number of acronyms, neologisms and phrases used to describe a variety of complex situations, permutations and opportunities. One of the most important is the Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Customers (B2C) binary. Traditionally, a business is one or the other, or both but with a clear separation between the units. Businesses are then structured according to these frameworks, from strategy development, operations, product design, logistics, sales and even how the business is marketed. Historically, both spaces are highly competitive but B2B is considered more difficult.

retirement

This is due to the nature of selling goods and services to other businesses rather than direct to customers. Business customers are more loyal than individual customers due to a variety of factors including, longer contracts and agreements, greater administrative costs and highly regulated tender processes. This makes it difficult to break established relationships and sell a new product. As the transaction values are higher, business owners can be reluctant to constantly shift their business around.

The environment is also more stable and conservative than B2C, meaning marketers have less room for creativity and expression. Blending effective, creative communication without compromising the complex message that businesses want to transmit to their clients (whether B2B or B2C) has become the Holy Grail of brilliant integrated marketing. A company that has taken on this challenge with their latest client-facing initiative is Liberty Corporate and their ‘The benefit of benefits’ campaign.

Understanding the Liberty Corporate and employee benefits  

Liberty Corporate, a business unit within the Liberty Group, focuses on providing quality customer-centric financial products to employers and their employees. Under the stewardship of Sandile Hlophe, CEO of Liberty’s Group Arrangements, Liberty Corporate uses a model of Business to Business to Customer (B2B2C) to achieve this ambitious strategy. This means tackling the complex industry of employee benefits by identifying its three primary clients, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), large corporates, multinationals and affinities, while always bearing in mind the person most impacted by employee benefits, the employee.

As Tshepo Matseba, Divisional Director: Marketing and Communication at Liberty Corporate explains: “Our primary clients are SMEs, large corporates and multinationals – we aim to have conversations with decision-makers across those segments, to understand their needs as businesses and recommend customised solutions to help them provide holistic value to their employees across risk, retirement, and financial security. However, we cannot ignore the significance of our secondary client – the individual or member of a retirement fund. Given our customer centric philosophy, we believe in putting the customer first, and that also goes for members or our umbrella or retirement funds.” This translates to embarking on a campaign to inform and educate employees on their benefits while also enabling employers to make financial freedom possible for their employees.

The value of truly knowing

Continuing the theme that the Liberty Group has established in its previous above the line campaigns and its ‘The Advantage of knowing’ concept, Liberty Corporate keeps up the momentum by identifying the challenges that businesses face in low economic conditions. This includes research which shows that employers can lose up to nine times an employee’s salary when an employee resigns*. As Matseba reveals, “There is research which shows that employee benefits is one of the most powerful employee retention tools an employer can have.

We also know that employers whose employees are happy with their benefit packages are twice as likely to be happy with their employer too, rising levels of performance and satisfaction.” Knowing this information and sharing it can go a long way in allowing intermediaries to provide better advice to their clients as the behaviour of employers in choosing employee benefits is better understood.

Integrated campaign

With this knowledge, Liberty Corporate leverages its deep intellectual assets to provide key themes using a multi-channel approach. Over the next five months, there will be segmented, channel-appropriate messages broadcast on various media platforms. This includes live-reads and interviews on national, regional and community radio stations such as Kay FM, Classic FM and more. Print adverts and thought-leadership articles on a host of daily, weekly and monthly newspapers, magazines and industry publications. The Liberty Youtube page will become a up-to-date visual content. Liberty’s social media pages (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will carry customer-centric rich content with deep linking for specific topics that can be easily accessed in an interactive way.

The Liberty website will also be regularly updated with new insights, giving clients as much information in an informative, dynamic manner. Creative supporting the tagline “Giving your bottom line the benefits of benefit” has also been created to exploit native advertising opportunities such as web banners for Liberty Corporate’s media partner’s website and sponsored Facebook ads.

As Matseba notes, “The campaign comes at an opportune time when employers are looking at employment more closely by strengthening their value propositions. This is more so in the current tough economic environment, with so much pressure on the bottom line. In such times employers recognise the importance of making the right hires and offering attractive employee benefit packages to ensure staff engagement, which in turn has a positive impact on retention. Ultimately, it is the role of employee benefits providers to partner with employers, helping them to enhance the lives of their most valuable asset – their people.”

Moving from marketing buzzwords and complex insurance jargon, to compelling, well-crafted messages, Liberty is forging ahead in the B2B marketing terrain. To the benefit of all.

  • Sandile Xaso, Marketing Specialist, Liberty Group South Africa.
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