With the goal of ultimately raising awareness and changing the limited perception of its target audience, Paychex Retirement Services chose to focus first on an important goal – solidifying and exhibiting a strong, well thought out approach to branding.

Over the past 40 years, Paychex has been slowly building upon its small business payroll roots, to continuously offer its client base products and services that relate to payroll, human resources, and human capital management. As a result, many divisions within Paychex have formed – each relating to a succinct product/service suite specialty: Paychex Payroll Services, Paychex HR Services, Paychex Insurance Agency (services), and Paychex Retirement Services.

Specifically within the past 15 years, Paychex Retirement Services, in particular, has offered retirement services [primarily 401(k)] products and services to the Paychex payroll client base. Paychex Retirement Services also has traditionally partnered with Financial Advisors, where appropriate. In an effort to expand the client base, Paychex Retirement Services has invested in its infrastructure to support the Financial Advisor relationship, expand the Financial Advisor network, and to bring in and support new client growth. In doing so, a concerted effort, as mentioned above, also went into the marketing and branding of Paychex Retirement Services itself, in order to raise awareness with Financial Advisors, and improve the limited perception with those Advisors it did have brand equity with.

To accomplish raising awareness and creating strong brand perception with Financial Advisors, the Marketing Team within Paychex Retirement Services created an integrated marketing plan that encompassed the following: a new website including SEM/SEO (www.paychex.com/advisors), social media outreach (www.twitter.com/Paychex4FAs), print collateral (16 pieces for wholesalers and retirement services reps), trade shows marketing (10 concentrated FA shows across the country), content marketing (including a content partnership with Morningstar^® on 100-120 articles, and various DCIO partners), email drip marketing (including a bimonthly newsletter), creation of value-add tools for Financial Advisors (kindex.paychex.com), public relations, and more.

The campaign, which cost just over $100,000 and has been successful in creating hundreds of thousands of impressions, gaining traction in awareness at trade shows, brought in over 800 leads to the Paychex Retirement Services wholesalers, and has produced over a million dollars so far in revenue – all in less than a year.

Authored by: Richard Brindisi and Jennifer Cooper

EDITOR’S NOTE: PayChex was a 2013 Pinnacle Award winner in the Campaign Category #1 for Branding. For a full list of the 2013 winners, read the News Release.  Rochester Business Journal’s article following the event is available here.  A full photo album from the event is posted here.