Charles Schwab, the banking provider and brokerage, is utilising a nuanced podcasting strategy to engage consumers about their money and lead them towards using the company’s products.

Helen Loh, Schwab’s SVP of digital and content marketing, discussed this subject at the Incite Group's 2019 Brand Marketing Summit in San Francisco.

And she pointed to a lightly-branded podcast from the company, which is entitled “Choiceology”, focuses on behavioural economics and aims to show that Schwab understands their real-life money concerns.

In pursuit of this goal, host Katy Milkman, a professor at The Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania, discussed why people sometimes make unwise decisions with money.

“Basically, it’s telling people that we’re [all] human beings and we make mistakes,” Loh said. (For more, read WARC's in-depth report: Schwab creates its own podcast marketing funnel.)

“We have biases that get in our way of making smart decisions, so by revealing these biases, we hope to help people make better decisions … so they can have a better financial future – and, of course, hopefully, they’ll think better of Schwab, and they’ll do business with us,” she added.

“Choiceology”, in fact, steers listeners toward a second podcast, entitled “Financial Decoder”, which offers strategies and solutions that can help consumers deal with the choices they’ve made.

Hosted by Mark Riepe, VP at Charles Schwab Center for Financial Research, “Financial Decoder” has clear aims. “We’re hopeful this will lead them into the rest of the funnel,” Loh said. “It’s proving to be really engaging as well.”

Schwab puts paid digital support behind the podcasts to drive awareness. “When we started this content marketing effort, it was mostly [promoted] through old media and organic social,” Loh said.

“But what we realised was we weren’t reaching people in the moment they needed us ... So we started testing paid media. The good news is that it worked really well,” she added.

“We used the [multi-variate optimisation] model and it has told us year after year” to “very significantly” increase the allocation of funds, she explained. “What it told us is that it’s part of an efficient ecosystem of media spend.”

Sourced from WARC