Royal London

Royal London is the UK’s largest mutual life insurance and pensions company. As such, it is owned by its members. Ever since its launch in 1861, it has been focused on helping people to help themselves. Its audience spans more than 1.6 million people in the UK, aged from 18 to 100+, who range in socioeconomic background and financial sophistication.

Research carried out by Royal London revealed that a large proportion of the UK public are either put off by financial jargon or uninterested in financial content as it tends to be dry and complex. As a result, Royal London asked us to come up with a way to engage people using an innovative new approach and to provide advice and information regarding the use of more accessible language.

With such a vast and varied audience, we looked at a wide variety of engagement tools and channels and eventually settled on a new monthly podcast series, called The penny drops. Royal London had never used podcasts as a communication channel before, so this was a new and exciting area to explore. The podcast had to have a broad appeal, but also specifically target two member segments: Building foundations (who are aged 18-35) and Prime time (35-54).

Together, we created a content plan detailing the topics for each episode and potential guests over the next year. Launch topics included saving, investing, debt and money management, and were timed to coincide with relevant dates on the calendar. For example, ‘Navigating your career as a woman or parent’ went live in March, just in time for International Women’s Day.

Since launch we have broadened the topics covered by the podcast to include subjects such as starting your own business, finance and disability, LGBT+ finances, and mortgages and homebuying.

The podcasts are published on iTunes, Podbean, Spotify, Google Podcast and Castbox. They are promoted via a quarterly emailer and social posts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We also encourage guests to share and promote the episode on their own channels.

The Penny Drops has been hugely successful, with a total of 22,000 total downloads since launch (as of the end of August 2021).

The first episode, titled ‘Popular money questions answered’, has received 3,446 downloads since its launch in November 2019 and continues to be downloaded by more listeners each month.

If you are interested in podcasts and would like to know more about how we can help you, pop us an email at hello@wardour.co.uk.