In March of 2016, Lincoln Financial Group partnered with Attention to launch a social campaign to support The Responsibility Love brand advertising campaign. The largest objective for this campaign was to inspire action by making the financial planning category more approachable as well as improve our key brand attributes of favorability, familiarity, and purchase intent.
The second objective was to have notable increases in engagement on our social media pages. This growth would help increase consumer advocacy, an element that research has shown improves favorability and trust with a brand.
Since research showed that our target audience is inherently social and openly engage with family, friends, and colleagues about financial matters we knew that social media played an important role in their financial planning journeys. Research showed social influenced them to start thinking about making a purchase (for example, a Facebook post or tweet they saw) and they were more likely to say they used social media to research a product (searching for topics, browsing posts, or even crowdsourcing).
Lincoln's new Responsibility of Love advertising campaign focuses on the innate human truth that we will go the extra mile to provide for and protect the ones we love. Leveraging the communal/familial platforms of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that were already facilitating financial conversations, we strove to influence conversations on how individuals could meet their own responsibilities of love with three video series, animated graphics, influencer posts, and informative social posts to grow awareness of Lincoln's offerings and favorability with the brand. These social campaigns' content mirrored the look and feel of our advertising efforts to allow for a consistent message to be present across multiple touch points to build awareness of Lincoln's new market message.
To help infuse the industry differentiating Responsibility of Love message into our social content strategy we created three video series throughout the year that additional content was built around. Video content allowed Lincoln to quickly share impactful messages embedded in the platforms. This less invasive approach was designed to capture our target audience's attention and then supporting content was provided to drive deeper engagement to lincolnfinancial.com.
For the launch of the campaign, we created content leveraging the talent from the Responsibility of Love print photo shoot. The "behind the scenes" videos' vision was to match the photography look and feel, while bringing the message of the "Responsibility of Love" to life by capturing the candid moments and heartfelt, non-scripted interviews with our subjects about what responsibility of love meant to them. These videos, and the entire campaign, were preceded by a teaser video, featuring a dozen people discussing the little things that you do for the people you love with the idea that Lincoln could help you do more.
In the fall, we altered the narrative to move beyond establishing the responsibilities of love and provided authentic perspectives of how individuals could start conversations themselves. The Talk videos', which used the familiar tropes of an uncomfortable parental sit down but recast in a financial light, showcased how families could start conversations about the importance of life and long-term care insurance.
Finally, to end the year, our Resolutions of Love series, asked subjects how they were planning for the people they love, specifically financially, in the new year. This content allowed us to leverage the timely moment of the holidays while also inserting Lincoln into individuals' goal-planning process. Again, these non-scripted stories helped build an authenticity and familarity with theLincoln's brand.
The launch video series drove high engagement. We had over 225K video views that reached the 50% mark. We also saw strong success leveraging influencers, gaining over 3K engagements and 500K impressions supporting the Responsibility of Love story. The campaign launched in March, and Lincoln saw 262% increase in engagements month-over-month. These videos and supporting content would generate over 24 million impressions through August.
The Talk and Resolutions of Love video series would provide an additional 4.75 million impressions and over 100K engagements in the second half of the year. These video series helped keep engagements high with all of our social content making Lincoln Financial a leader in the industry with a normalized engagement rate per post of 103 compared to an industry average of 10.
Most importantly, we found that social media users that were aware of Lincoln Financial social posts gained 31 to 43 points on social media users who were not aware of Lincoln posts in key attributes such as familiarity, favorabiliy, purchase intent and interest in learn more. Our strategy was not only driving strong engagement, it was also impacting the perception of Lincoln helping to keep Lincoln top of mind with the individuals when they were ready to act on their own financial plans.
