Leverage thought leadership to increase sales
MetLife needed a strategy to deliver industry insights and online tools that would bring thought leadership to life.
Situation
How can you make thought leadership more than just an opinion piece?
MetLife has long been considered a market leader in providing employee benefits programs to the business community. Recognizing the need for thought leadership to help employers develop optimized benefits strategies, MetLife launched, in 2003, the annual MetLife Study of Employee Benefits Trends. The report, based on the firm’s nationwide survey of U.S. employees and employers, was enthusiastically received by employers and MetLife’s institutional sales force, underlining the strong demand for additional benefits-related resources. MetLife recognized an opportunity to develop a comprehensive thought leadership strategy that would provide MetLife’s institutional sales force with the tools it needed to successfully engage employers in benefits-related conversations.
Solution
Transforming insight into action.
Together, MetLife and Carpenter Group developed an overarching strategy for MetLife’s employee benefits thought leadership. The new approach included supplementing the annual study with a comprehensive suite of sales tools and resources to help MetLife’s sales force and employers fully leverage the study’s data. The updated Employee Benefits Trends Study (EBTS) offers in-depth analysis of raw benefits-related survey data set in the broader context of demographic, political and economic shifts. It draws on proprietary MetLife research and 3rd-party sources to provide actionable insights for benefits professionals. Two companion pieces—the Benchmarking Report and the Online Benchmarking Tool—allow advisors and employers to create custom queries of survey data to evaluate a company’s employee benefits offering against its peers in terms of company size, industry and region, as well as the expectations of employees by lifestage, income level, generation and job type.
Recent metrics show dramatically increased awareness and usage of EBTS and the Benefits Benchmarking Tool, with nearly double the number of visits to the MetLife website, a significant increase in new site registrations and substantial growth in the number of visits to other online content from EBTS and the Benchmarking Tool.
