Competitive Analytics for Aviva Investors

The Client

Aviva Investors (‘Aviva’), the global asset management business of Aviva plc, manages over £263bn on behalf of its clients. The company prides itself of being an actively responsible investment firm and places a strong focus on educating its clients on environmental, sustainable, and socially aware investing.

The marketing team’s editorial group regularly publishes content that goes beyond product-promotion and towards a deeper discussion on the role finance plays in delivering economic and social change.

The Project

Aviva wanted to compare its content to that created by its main competitors. This includes insights into the amount of content published, topics covered and language style.

To that end, Aviva commissioned FinText to deliver a competitive content analysis survey, to uncover, among others, the following insights:

• How much content does Aviva publishes relative to its main competitors?
• How readable is Aviva’s content relative to its competitors – and what can it do better?
• How much effort do Aviva’s competitors place on ESG content, compared with Aviva?
• What can Aviva do to help its (professional-investor targeted) content win more engagement?

The Process

FinText confirmed with the client a list of five competitors, for whom insight content would be analysed, and compared to Aviva’s content. We agreed for the analysis would span two entire financial quarters.

Using it bespoke suite of text analytics tools, FinText analyses large volumes of text to uncover underlying patterns. It can then compare patterns in a company’s content to those of its peers, and to desirable patterns in sources clients already enjoy.

Unlike analytics solutions that measure traffic or platform activity, content analytics are forward-looking, and can show companies what to adjust in their content so that it builds client trust.

The Outcomes

Aviva received an extensive analysis of how its content compares relative to its main competitors. The data was analysed to extract practical steps Aviva might consider when creating new content. Specific advice on readability, article structure, and topics covered.

For one, our analysis showed that, as a proportion of articles published, Aviva leads the pack in its focus on ESG; more than half its articles are dedicated to the topic. On top, Aviva is far more focused on social issues than any of its peers and tends to publish fewer articles talking about ESG in broad strokes.

In Their Words

We hired FinText because we wanted to become far more scientific and intentional when creating content.

There are plenty of agencies and consultancies offering qualitative content audits and generic competitor research. However, we wanted a detailed analysis of where we stood vs key competitors on metrics such as length, tone of voice and reading difficulty.

We wanted to banish ‘finger in the air’ judgements and use data to assess whether our content production was in line with our strategy. FinText fully delivered.

James Whiteman, Head of Client Communications and Content, Aviva Investors