The Problem

Employee benefits firms can be difficult to differentiate—they tend to all sell the same plans from the same carriers with the same jargon. But Corporate Synergies has some independent thinkers, people obsessed with finding a better way to provide healthcare to their clients’ employees. 

Unfortunately, they were stuck. Their old marketing approach had stopped working. It was time for a new approach.

The Solution

With the business goal of raising the company’s brand awareness to help generate demand, we agreed on a thought leadership-driven media relations strategy. And in the professional services industry, where the discourse can be equal parts obtuse and surface-level, we recognized that Corporate Synergies’ subject matter experts knew their stuff, inside and out, and came up with the messaging platform “deeper understanding”—reflecting their knowledge of the business, of emerging trends, and of their clients’ needs.

It’s great to have smart SMEs, but it takes a pro to turn their thinking into something compelling and consumable for the target audience. Our team’s natural intellectual curiosity drives our client interactions. In other words, we’re nerds with a thirst for understanding things like HSAs, FSAs and the upside of self-insurance, and that enables us to extract knowledge out of the heads of our clients. 

The content creation process became a fast-moving flywheel; we created high-quality, journalistic content that editors were begging for (almost literally—editors started reaching out to have Corporate Synergies draft articles on breaking news).

“Thank you for sending great bylines. Please feel free to send all that you think will work.” – Editor, Employee Benefit News

The Result

Over more than a decade of working together, we’ve placed hundreds of bylined articles in vertical trade industry media and mainstream business press, creating tremendous SEO value and driving traffic to their website.

Corporate Synergies’ thought leadership content has been seen by millions of people and won numerous awards. Perhaps more importantly, this long-running initiative has generated an aura of credibility around their brand and provided customer-facing account managers and producers with media-blessed content to share with clients and prospects and to include in RFP responses.

Add it all together, and our work with Corporate Synergies has helped them to attract new clients and win millions of dollars in new business.