BlackRock
As BlackRock began work on reintroducing their brand and expanding their focus to reach a broader group of investors, they wanted to bring a stronger focus to new digital channels as a way of engaging their customers. Having seen early success in podcasting, they came to RAIN to develop a broader audio presence inclusive of smart voice assistants.
We engaged in two projects for BlackRock to help build relationships with their different audiences, a short-form audio briefing to inform financial advisors of the firm’s latest market perspectives and a search optimization effort geared toward improving BlackRock’s content visibility through voice assistant devices.
Through stakeholder interviews and reviewing audience segmentation data, we learned that financial advisors seeking the firm’s expertise and analysis were finding the traditional PDF reports and email newsletters challenging to digest and hard to engage with. After learning that many advisors turned to podcasts and audio content on their commutes to stay up to date, we pursued a short-form audio briefing accessible through RSS feed, Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices as a way to repurpose BlackRock’s content in a more engaging way. The new program, BlackRock Briefings, was well received by advisors and saw strong listenership.
In addition to financial advisors BlackRock was looking to develop awareness with a younger millennial investor audience, some of whom were just starting their journey toward financial literacy. Search provided a way for BlackRock to leverage their vast expertise and existing website content as a way to engage this group through channels such as mobile and voice search. After prioritizing key pages based on audience research, we optimized a set of BlackRock content to beat out competitors and position the organization as an educational authority around investing.
Results
Within the first 3 months of launch, BlackRock Briefings achieved over 4,000 plays and secured a spot on Google’s selected news briefings for the financial services category.
90% of BlackRock content pages where voice optimizations were implemented saw SEO gains and increased visibility through voice assistants.
