The video is a hit with investors and employees. People have commented saying it’s the nicest work we’ve ever created.
Explaining a complicated offering
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.
The MassMutual Trust Company had assets explaining their services, but needed something that would get prospects interested and – just as important – help MassMutual financial advisors understand what the trust company offers.
President of The MassMutual Trust Company, Joe Rokowski, says, “We work primarily through financial advisors as intermediaries. It’s hard to explain what we do to 9,000 advisors across the country.”
During our marketing diagnostic, we discovered all of MassMutual’s marketing materials were aimed at people who already knew what a trust company does and why you’d want one. MassMutual was missing a top-of-funnel piece that agitated the need for a trust in the first place.
Inspiring a feeling
To get high net-worth individuals to feel the need to establish a trust, we needed to step back and understand what a trust really does.
Yes, a trust makes sure wealth is preserved, grown and transferred from one party to another in an efficient and effective manner. But relative to the person establishing the trust, it’s handing down their legacy. It’s their life’s work being passed on.
MassMutual needed a video that inspired that feeling of legacy in the mind of the target prospect: the high net-worth individual.
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 often not what people really want to pass down to the next generation. People really want to pass down 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 began to take form: the story of a dad passing down a magic coin trick—the trick representing his values, the coin representing his wealth.
Make people remember through feeling
It’s been said that people only remember 5% of what you tell them in a piece of marketing, but most will remember how that piece made them feel.
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.
Let’s talk
We’ve helped companies just like yours win more customers with video. Tell us about your goals.
