Case Study: Steps to investing for Janus Henderson

40% of adults with between £40,000 and £150,000 in savings are put off the idea of investing because they think it’s too complicated.

That’s a staggering amount of money not being invested, and an awful lot of people missing out, all because of a potential perception problem. Janus Henderson decided to do something about tackling that perceived complexity.

Strategy

Insight-driven approach

Our aim was to provide Janus Henderson with the right strategy, messages, and content to connect with a whole new target market – individuals who had sufficient wealth to invest, but who lacked the confidence and information to get started. We started by conducting primary research and secondary research. We concluded that the three main barriers to people getting actively involved in investing their money were: Risk, Complexity and Trust.

It was clear to us that there was a very real opportunity for Janus Henderson to engage with people who would benefit greatly from having a trusted source of investment information they could turn to for easy-to-understand guidance – people with enough wealth to invest but not enough confidence to get started. The key was to develop a series of interesting and informative pieces of content that would lead the target audience on a journey to becoming better informed about investing. It would need to be easy to understand, not patronising, and delivered in a way that took them on that journey in a step-by-step manner. The campaign was branded stepstoinvesting.com, because it describes perfectly the journey new investors follow.

Design strategy

Everything we developed, produced, and built followed a user-centric, customer first philosophy to ensure things were visually appealing and easy to use.

We built a series of paper prototypes of the stepstoinvesting.com site, at its various stages of development. Those prototypes were then subjected to rigorous UX testing and were evaluated in full by a team of users. We also constructed interactive wireframes, which were tested and assessed in the same manner.

User feedback was gathered at each key stage of the project’s development and fed into a cycle of iterative improvement that meant not only did the navigation of the site and the content on it work brilliantly but it also helped to build a strong, and stylish branded user interface.

Support and promotion

Once the campaign went live, the hard work of generating traffic, views, clicks, and downloads began in earnest. Steps to Investing has been supported by a series of activities, including: Education Activities, Search Advertising, Email, Social Media (paid and owned), and Press & PR.

In May 2018 Steps to Investing won an AIC award for Best Marketing Campaign. The award panel praised the winner for being bold, well-executed and for doing something different. The site was educational and engaging and the judges felt it was a contemporary approach to marketing.

It has since won the Gramercy Institute Financial Content Marketing Award (2019) and The Financial Services Forum (FSF) Product and Service Innovator Award (2019).

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David Hunstone is CEO and director of content at Hub.