Behind the scenes of Betterment’s B2B brand awareness campaign

Who. Kim Rosenblum is CMO of Betterment, an independent digital investing advisor platform. The 16-year-old company began as a direct-to-consumer platform, giving people easy access to investing in ETFs and long-term wealth management. It was the first “robo-advisor,” which provides automated investment portfolios based on your preferences and is now a standard feature of every investment firm doing business online.

Over the past few years, the company has expanded its scope to include B2B services like 401k programs, a solution for registered independent advisors and more.

The problem. Despite Betterment’s long-term success and technical accomplishments, it has a real problem with brand awareness. One reason is they operate in the shadow of sector giant Fidelity Investments.

“You start as a digital brand going into a legacy category where Fidelity has online presence and brick-and-mortar offices and they’re running ads in a huge media spend,” Rosenblum told MarTech.

“While we have a really sticky customer base, we don’t have a lot of awareness or familiarity,” she said. “When you think awareness, most people think consumer, but when we go to talk about our 401K, the chief people officer has to go to the company and say, ‘Hey, we’re going with this Betterment.’ And people are like, ‘What’s that? Who’s running my retirement plan?’” 

However, the brand’s focus on long-term investing and planning does help it stand out in the fintech sector.

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The solution. Last month, Rosenblum and her team launched the year-long brand awareness campaign “Pursue Better.” It features four professional athletes facing the same challenges as the millennial audience segment the company is going after. They are WNBA All-Star Arike Ogunbowale, recently retired women’s soccer legend Carli Lloyd, quarterback Drake Maye — last year’s first-round draft pick by the New England Patriots, and golfer Michael Thorbjornsen who recently joined the PGA Tour after a highly successful career as an amateur.

“Our core business is really aimed at the millennial professional space,” said Rosenblum. “People who are starting to invest for the long term or are at the beginning of an investing journey.”

This audience segment consists of people who have big life events happening, she said. They’re buying homes, having their first child and the other things that have people thinking long term.

“They’re optimizers,” Rosenblum said. “They like to do things that are efficient, because they’re super busy people. For our campaign, we wanted people who have very busy, packed lives and don’t have time to think about their finances day-to-day. All of them are in a life stage that is at a turning point. They’re at a place where they need to focus all in on what they’re doing.”

Case in point: Carli Lloyd. Even though she just retired — something few, if any, millennials are currently doing — she’s also beginning a career as a Fox Sports analyst and is about to have a baby. 

“She very much wants to focus everything and all her talent and into this next chapter of her life,” said Rosenblum. “She’s got a lot going on. So who’s taking care of her money long term?”

It’s also an audience segment that grew up using their phone for everything: “It’s not an unusual concept to them to think about a digital or tech platform as their first stop for financial planning, which might have been a little bit mind-blowing 10 years ago.”

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Content and channels. The campaign, launched days before we spoke with Rosenblum, is using YouTube and paid social media. 

For content, the Betterment team spent a full day shooting video with each athlete. From that, they created about 30 pieces of content for each person. The content will be posted on social media ads and the athletes will post them using their own handles. 

“We weren’t expecting any lessons learned four days after launch,” said Rosenblum, “but everyone posted on the first day. And on that day the cumulative views and engagement was well beyond our expectations, like 10 times what our own organic social could have gotten in that time.”

Measuring success. Brand awareness campaigns are trickier to measure than those aimed at increasing sales. 

“We have a brand health tracker that we keep an eye on, measuring ourselves against a competitive set,” she said. “We look at awareness, familiarity, momentum, quality and we also ask people to tell us brand attributes.”

The company wants to be known as the trusted brand that handles your money so you can live your life.

“Trust is really important,” Rosenblum said. “We’re managing people’s retirement.”