Patient money
Patient money
UK pensions research content campaign · CACEIS · 2025
In short. A European custodian bank with almost no profile in UK pensions needed to be taken seriously by defined benefit schemes on private markets. On a budget of £25,000, I built a campaign around original market research produced with a leading pensions title, launched it to a room of scheme decision-makers, and turned it into a year of authority the sales team could actually use
The UK pensions market is going through its biggest structural change in a generation. Schemes are consolidating. Regulatory reporting requirements are tightening, particularly around unlisted assets. And appetite for private markets is growing faster than most schemes' ability to administer them, because private assets have always been the awkward class to accommodate.
CACEIS had built a platform to take that administrative burden off schemes. The problem was not the product. It was that asset servicing in the UK is a saturated market, and we were a French banking brand that most of the target audience could not have named.
No authority to trade on. You cannot publish your own research into a market that has never heard of you and expect it to be read, let alone believed. Credibility has to come from somewhere before content can do any work.
A saturated field and a small budget. Twenty-five thousand pounds does not buy share of voice against incumbents with established relationships. Anything resembling a general awareness campaign would have disappeared without trace.
An audience that is hard to reach and easy to bore. Pensions professionals are besieged by vendor content. The material had to be genuinely accessible without becoming glib, because this audience can spot a technical subject being talked down to.
Rather than addressing the pensions market, I segmented hard: smaller and medium-sized schemes with minimal existing allocation to private assets. Underserved, structurally likely to need exactly what we had built, and small enough as a segment that £25,000 could reach a meaningful proportion of it.
This was the call that mattered. The obvious move was a CACEIS whitepaper. I argued against it. A brand with no standing in a market cannot assert authority, it can only demonstrate it, and the fastest route to demonstrating it is to attach yourself to someone the audience already trusts.
So we partnered with a leading pensions title to run original survey research among scheme representatives, weighted towards defined benefit, covering consolidation, private markets allocation and the quality of reporting on unlisted assets. It was published as an exclusive supplement under their masthead.
The research was genuinely useful to the people who answered it, which is what made it work. It also meant our first substantial contact with the market was us asking questions rather than making claims.
The supplement launched at an invitation-only lunch attended by over fifty industry leaders representing thirty-five schemes. We filmed attendees discussing what the research had surfaced, which gave us client voices rather than vendor voices for everything that followed.
The lunch deliberately preceded the national conference, where our product leader delivered a keynote I drafted, supported by digital and on-site activation. By the time we were speaking from a stage, the research was already circulating in the room.
I ghostwrote editorials for regional sales leaders across social and owned channels, all pointing to the product landing page and all carrying a consistent voice, which does as much for organic discovery as it does for coherence. Alongside our web and growth teams, I optimised new and existing content for SEO and GEO, so the material stayed discoverable through search and through AI answer engines long after the event had passed.
A 150% increase in marketing qualified leads to the product landing page, driven by the ghostwritten editorial programme.
Product and brand awareness tripled post-event, according to the agency impact report.
A 75% increase in AI-answer citations across the optimised content, meaning the campaign kept surfacing in the place buyers increasingly start.
All of it for £25,000, in a market where that figure would not normally buy a hearing.
The research supplement — Pensions Expert survey of scheme representatives on consolidation, private markets and reporting (PDF)
What UK pension schemes are thinking — video vox pop from the launch event
Can the LTAF save portfolios and the planet? — thought leadership on long-term asset funds (archived)
Disciplines: Content marketing · B2B brand marketing · Thought leadership · Original research · Event activation
Sector: Financial services
> A clean break - Where those clients came from. The divestiture that handed hundreds of institutional relationships to a brand they had not chosen.