Real talk with Redzone: Kelly Driscoll of Sanlam

The Google Excellence in Digital Brand Marketing Award winner Sanlam used powerful digital interventions to drive its new purpose of helping Africans live with financial confidence. In 2021, the group ran a multicountry, multimoment digital marketing campaign to launch its “Live with Confidence” promise and brand repositioning and to empower consumers financially.

Kelly Driscoll, senior manager of digital marketing and social media at Sanlam, says: “The campaign was articulated through multiple digital touchpoints and numerous audience funnels, which allowed us to tell rich, relevant, personalised stories. We delivered a series of multimoment experiences throughout the year, with results that surpassed all internal and industry benchmarks.”

The award-winning campaign garnered 900-million impressions and 131-million engagements. The overall 49% increase in web traffic increased online sales across the group by 14%.

Driscoll says the campaign gave Sanlam the perfect opportunity to put some of its new group-wide digital marketing transformation strategies – which include measurement frameworks, digital skills training and an improved MarTech (marketing, technology and strategy) ecosystem – to the test. 

Digital, with confidence

In the Live with Confidence campaign Sanlam launched its bold new positioning across seven African markets. Myriad digital strategies were employed, from using high-reach, high-impact channels and creating immersive digital experiences to employing influencer marketing and relevant remarketing funnels.

Here’s how it ran, in a nutshell:

● The Live with Confidence launch event garnered 30-million organic impressions through local influencers’ engagement with their audiences.

● The Twitter Promoted Trend and First View video delivered almost 4-million impressions and 400,000 video views, which beat all Sanlam benchmarks.

● The new positioning was shared across high-impact digital out-of-home advertising and unpacked in a brand manifesto delivered as a digital film.

● Younger demographics were reached through Snapchat and Spotify.

● An automated Facebook chatbot facilitated 56,000 one-on-one chats with Sanlam’s confidence coach – famed football manager José Mourinho. Chat participants then had the option to download their customised book of confidence rules from the Sanlam site.

● These confidence rules appeared across myriad traditional and digital touchpoints, from data-driven banners to digital out-of-home and roadside videos, plus a Twitter Amplify pre-roll, which received almost 8-million impressions.

● An additional always-on content strategy kept the brand top-of-mind, adding another 38-million impressions, along with over 10-million engagements.

● Additionally, Ayanda, a Snapchat AR assistant, coached young people on the importance of goal setting, delivering over 2-million engagements in two days.

● Finally, a digital financial check tool was built, empowering close to 3,000 people to check their financial health, in just three months. And a Sanlam Savings Jar app kept kids motivated and engaged, letting them effortlessly start their savings journey. It had 30,000 downloads in five months.

Sanlam’s turbo-charged digital marketing transformation efforts took its maturity level (based on the Google Digital Marketing Maturity Benchmark Survey) from 1.2 in 2019 to 2.3 in 2022, which indicates growth towards a newly connected digital organisation.

So, what’s next?

Driscoll says Sanlam wants to focus on the key financial questions people need to ask themselves in the specific life stage they’re in to ensure a life of confidence. “We are creating digital tools people can interact with and learn from. We are forging truly bespoke, data-driven journeys for people, based on what we learn through our online interactions with them,” Driscoll says.

“We are constantly challenging ourselves to do things differently. We believe in the power of creativity and in keeping human insights at the core of what we do. We’re driven by our mission to bring financial inclusivity to everyone. We are working on a new digital offering that will engage the market, with the aim of building a more trusting relationship with financial services. For us, long-term success is a stable, secure, financially confident population of people across Africa.”