Securian Financial Group’s chief marketing officer Ann McGarry is a big believer in innovation.
“We call ourselves catalysts which I think is a really intentional word,” says McGarry. “We’re catalysts for marketing innovation and we champion the customer to drive value for the organization. That’s the vision that we always have, that’s what I keep in mind when I think about how to organize marketing, how to staff marketing. I push everybody to keep top of mind in how they’re figuring out their work on a day-to-day basis and what we should be looking at moving forward.”
The financial services company takes a B-to-B-to-C approach to marketing. Much of their focus is on cultivating relationships and education with trusted financial professionals who serve as trusted financial professionals to consumers.
“We’re very focused right now on the trusted partner audience so all of those B-to-B audiences have important relationships with their consumers as a trusted partner,” explains McGarry. “We want to be a trusted partner to the trusted partners so that’s what our campaign is primarily focused through LinkedIn right now. We’ve had a number of challenges to our brand budgets lately. As we’ve been recovering from the pandemic our brand budgets have not bounced back as quickly as we would like them to.”
Prior to joining Securian Financial Group, McGarry held senior roles at United Healthcare, Wells Fargo and American Express Financial Advisors. Brand Innovators caught up with McGarry from her office in Minneapolis to talk about innovation, marketing on LinkedIn and AI. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about what your approach is to innovation?
I just always want everybody to be open and curious. I’ll always be looking at what’s new, what are the opportunities. I think most of our innovation right now is coming to us through our different marketing technologies and mostly right now I would say it’s AI. So what are the different types of AI that we can explore to make our work more effective to get for sure more efficient.
Right now I would say everything is mostly an efficiency play, but over time I’m confident we’re going to find increased effectiveness as well. We’ve got a number of technologies that we’re working with. It’s always a question of how you define innovation. Is it a life changing different thing or is it that sort of incremental always getting better improvement and mostly like I said related to efficiency is where our innovation comes from.
What are you using AI for?
You’ve got a lot of work happening on the design side of things and the graphics capabilities that come with we are an Adobe shop so there are a variety of different AI related and I’m just talking about marketing now I mean the organization overall there are a number of different really meaningful applications for AI on the business operations side of things whether it’s underwriting or all kinds of different applications in the core business.
For marketing right now it’s mostly in the graphics work that we’re doing whether it’s changing the background of a photo or helping us to very quickly come up with a graphical image. We’re exploring different kinds of support in the writing area whether it’s coming up with headlines or quickly summarizing things, which is kind of a traditional approach to AI right now. But my role is to continue to push for that openness and curiosity so that we’re not just ignoring the capabilities that are popping up.
Can you talk about who your audience is and how you’re reaching these audiences?
We are a B-to-B-to-C organization, so right now we are very focused on building our B-to-B brand so at the top of the organization really focused on B-to-B awareness so we have several B-to-B audiences employers that are providing insurance related benefits to their employees they are a key audience, as well as the benefit consultants that they work with there’s different groups of consultants and brokers that are intermediaries for us.
We also have a business line that is very focused on banks and credit unions and other financial institutions that we sell our products through. Then we have financial professionals, which is a traditional financial advisor/financial professional relationship that sells our life insurance and annuity product lines to consumers. We have different consumer audiences as well but the consumers are more of a homogeneous audience.
Do you have any current campaigns running out in the marketplace right now?
We are currently running a LinkedIn campaign that is focused on high level awareness. The way it works at Securian is the brand team is responsible for that highest level awareness and then our product marketing teams are a double-click down a notch down with their product level marketing. It’s kind of like the air cover and the ground cover working together to raise awareness within those B-to-B audience audiences.
Can you talk about how your past experiences have helped you in your current role?
I’ve been doing this for a long time. In my previous role I had exposure to the product lines. I came most recently from UnitedHealthcare where they were very focused on employee benefits. I knew the product line and I knew the different target audiences and trusted partners. A few roles prior to that, I was on the agency side so I learned a lot about consulting and forming those really critical relationships where you’re demonstrating the value that you can provide and the importance of marketing.
In every one of my jobs leading up to this one I’ve learned the importance of the traditional sales funnel raising awareness and continuing to drive consideration and engagement. That is basically what we do here every day, understanding those fundamentals. Although I’m probably much more of an administrator now. Once you get to that top role it’s all about making sure you have the right people in place, that you’re using the right process, the right technology and the right data to really be able to drive people down that sales funnel.
As we head into the 2025 year can you talk about any predictions you might have for marketing and the financial services category?
It is all about AI right now that’s definitely the bright shiny object but I would say that’s really just a continuation of the need for everything to be data-driven so data-driven marketing making sure you have the right data but the need to have access to the right data and to use it in a way that is truly effective we’re exploring account-based marketing. Now for example and just really getting as close to that one-to-one marketing that’s a phrase from a long time ago but it continues to be really true how do you use the data and what about your target audience to really personalize everything that you’re doing in a way that will just make it that much more relevant for the person you’re reaching out to.
Securian Financial is the marketing name for Securian Financial Group, Inc., and its subsidiaries. Minnesota Life Insurance Company and Securian Life Insurance Company are subsidiaries of Securian Financial Group, Inc.
