A film that inspires viewers to change.
The MassMutual Trust Company came to us with a doozy of a need: make high net-worth individuals, who haven’t already planned for their family’s future through a trust, consider talking to their MassMutual advisor about setting one up.
The need
Trust services aren’t as easy to understand as, say, life insurance or investment accounts. Trusts can involve multiple elements and they’re never really simple. MassMutual had assets explaining their services, but needed something that would get a prospect to want to read about them.
During our content audit, we noticed they were missing something emotional and deep. After all, the crux of what trust services enable is a person’s wishes and legacy to be looked after once they pass away. This is a complex, sensitive topic that field agents weren’t the best at explaining.
We wanted a video that had a message that resonated with advisors. We needed them to understand the space we occupy and remember our company in the future. The video is a hit with investors and employees. People have commented saying it’s the nicest work we’ve ever created.
The strategy
As we dug in, we realized MassMutual needed a video that inspired the idea of legacy in the mind of the target prospect: the high net-worth individual. From that inspiration, we’d leave it to the field agents to lead the prospect down the sales funnel, eventually bringing in the MassMutual Trust Company.
But how do we inspire someone to make a change, to look after their legacy? One option is fear (“Don’t let your family end up in court after you die!”), or to throw a bunch of data at them (“Did you know that x% of people over the age of 60 with a net worth of over $1mm don’t have a will??”).
None of those ideas were right and frankly, wouldn’t inspire someone to make a change. The target prospect likely knows they should prepare for the inevitable. Our content needed to provide the emotional push to make the phone call. We needed to tell a story – to hit the heartstrings – to make the desire to change feel like it came from inside the prospect, not our video.
The idea
We started thinking about what a legacy is. Obviously, a trust takes care of the financial and legal parts of your legacy, but that’s not what people really want to pass down. People really want to pass down to the next generation the ideas and values they hold dear, along with the money.
The word “values” started to stick out. We all have them; we all want our kids and grandkids to embody them because we know they work. The video concept was starting to take form: the story of a dad passing down a magic coin trick—the trick representing his values, the coin representing his wealth.
The takeaway
Don’t limit your thinking about sales content to explainers and demos. It can and should be much more than that. Start thinking about how you’re going to inspire your prospects to want to change – and how you position your product or service to facilitate that change.
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