Sarah Cowl – Content Marketing Manager, Aviva

Whilst Sarah works at Aviva she isn’t what you’d necessarily expect from a financial services marketer. She believes that pensions and life insurance don’t have to be boring and given the massive impact they have on peoples’ lives they certainly shouldn’t be.

In her current role as Content Marketing Manager, she knows that shareability is key to creating compelling social and digital content to spike the interest of her B2B financial adviser target audience. As a trained journalist, she understands it’s all about standing for something and is cementing Aviva’s position as a thought leader in behavioural science to help financial advisers understand how human behaviour impacts the way consumers make financial decisions. Sarah’s content role is all about increasing marketing effectiveness and moving away from big money paid media spend. Currently working with a circa £1m budget, she is making owned and earned media work as hard as they possibly can.

In her previous role as a Marketing Manager for workplace pensions, her challenge was to make government reform (with all employers having to provide company pensions) as sexy as it could be! Not an easy challenge granted, but one which resulted in Aviva taking its first steps in B2B social media and going digital by default.

Before 2010 when yellow became a colour Sarah could never look at again without thinking of Aviva, she worked across many areas of marketing in both the public and private sectors. Amongst other things, she has marketed the government’s contentious Care Records Service, promoted Liverpool’s Capital of Culture status and worked on the Guardian Unlimited website. Sarah lives in York with her husband Chris, but is a regular weekender with her sister in London and family in Liverpool.