Guardian
The Challenge
- Simplify the use of social media in a regulated industry
- Increase volume of fresh, compliant content
- Implement social selling program while maintaining FINRA compliance
The Solution
- Proofpoint Social Patrol for Social Selling
The Results
- Implemented best practice compliance and social selling program for advisors
- Ensured social profiles are compliant and revised workflows are aligned with how advisors and compliance teams work
- Increased confidence in compliance with automatic supervision of posts for harmful content and compliance risks
The Challenge
Today, Guardian has 8,000 employees and a network of over 3,000 advisors in more than 70 agencies nationwide. It provides a full range of insurance products and services, including life insurance, disability income insurance, dental, and vision. Throughout its legacy that began in 1860, Guardian has maintained a strong set of values while keeping client needs primary in everything the company does.
How to engage on social media and ensure compliance
With the dawn of social media as a powerful tool to engage customers, Guardian wanted to build a presence to market services and promote community outreach. The company also wanted to support advisors in their social selling efforts. Guardian knew social selling was a valuable prospecting pathway to penetrate new markets and find clients with whom advisors share common interests.
However, as a regulated entity, achieving that goal posed another challenge. Specifically, how do you engage on social media while adhering to regulations from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) that governs how financial service firms communicate with the public? As a relatively risk-adverse organization, Beth Wood, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Individual Markets at Guardian, knew the first step was to leverage a critical partnership with the company’s internal compliance team.
Once the marketing and compliance teams agreed to partner and move forward, they faced two other challenges. It was essential to have the right tools in place for workflows and compliance guardrails. Guardian also needed a way to provide advisors with fresh and compelling content they could share with their clients and communities. Advisors were sharing from the same pool of pre-approved content, which was quickly becoming stale. And they couldn’t personalize content to adopt the true social selling nature of sharing genuine content that’s relevant to the individual advisor and to their network.
The Solution
A holistic approach to social selling and compliance
Wood joined forces with the compliance team in the search for a product that would allow Guardian to define and adopt a best practice approach to compliance and social selling. They evaluated several solutions and selected the one that came out on top: Proofpoint Social Patrol for Social Selling.
“It was important to establish a partnership with experts in social media and compliance who could provide a best practice blueprint and the assistance we needed to simplify the process. Proofpoint provided us with just that,” said Wood.
The solution delivers on many elements that were important to Guardian, including end-to-end social media compliance support that enables social engagement and social selling at scale. “Social Patrol makes our lives easier and more secure. The automation and artificial intelligence that live behind the workflows give our compliance team an elevated level of confidence that we can deliver on our social media policy and provide a better social experience for our advisors,” said Wood.
The Results
Social Patrol applies advanced language processing and a wide range of compliance policies to accurately identify content that may pose a compliance risk. With its automated process to supervise, remediate, and archive content, Social Patrol helps Guardian ensure its engagement meets publiccommunications and retention requirements for financial services.
For social selling content, the Proofpoint solution is powered by Grapevine6. This provides Guardian’s advisors access to highly targeted content – both marketing-generated and third-party – to nurture their relationships with clients and find new prospects to fill their funnel.
“Content is the new currency in social selling,” said Wood. “Now, our advisors can define personal and professional interest graphs and automatically receive content that’s meaningful to them. This helps our advisors lead as independent thinkers and subject matter experts,” added Wood.
The solution’s built-in workflows align to how Guardian’s advisors and compliance teams work, which has created more synergy and streamlined processes. For example, advisors can modify their LinkedIn profile within the native app. If the compliance team does not approve the changes, Proofpoint can roll back the edits to the original profile. “Proofpoint creates an easier social sharing and social networking experience for advisors,” concluded Wood.