Operating in a highly disrupted sector, all successful insurance companies must engage and retain customers – more effectively and reduce high levels of annual churn. Ashwin Saddul, managing director at Better than Paper, highlights key digital marketing challenges and how they can be overcome – so better results are achieved

The big challenge for marketers at insurance companies is to ensure that their brands remain relevant and competitive – by establishing credibility and building mutually beneficial customer relationships. This means employing digital marketing activities better – with the consistent production of more engaging, personalised content – delivered in a compelling, memorable, and efficient way – and across a wider array of customer touchpoints. To achieve all these aims, fivechallenges need to be overcome. I have highlighted these below and discussed how each one can be effectively addressed.

1. Personalisation

Insurance companies need to identify segments and grow audience conversions with precision message targeting. In practice, it’s becoming harder for marketers to engage audiences because gaining their attention is increasingly difficult. This means to keep an audience’s awareness for longer, content must be personalised and made relevant – by getting the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

This objective can only be achieved by understanding that audiences are now highly selective, savvy and peer influencer-driven. They also represent different personas and different personas respond to varying content types. So there’s an increasing need to segment the demographic and psychographic market of audiences by assessing their different personality traits, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles – so tailored, relevant content can be delivered. Another advantage of doing this activity better, is by gaining a better understanding of audiences’ preferences – will play a role in achieving GDPR compliance too.

2. Multi-channel publishing

To increase customer satisfaction, insurance marketers need to better manage increasing demands for multi-channel, higher value, content – whilst attempting to increase engagement and dwell times – 24/7.

Using cutting-edge, fully integrated content and publishing platforms can enable marketers to unlock the potential of digital content, by effortlessly consolidating their own content – alongside curated web and social content – that is published across mobile, tablet and desktop devices. Platforms also help simplify the digital content production processes, rapidly increase higher value output and reduce the rising cost of content production – by updating or producing material, such as news, research, reports and high quality videos – consistently and swiftly.

Platforms with integrated tools should be particularly sought after to help marketers create a meaningful and interactive dialogue with target audiences through highly targeted, personalised content – at the right time, anywhere – based on customer insight from analytics functions. Greater customer stickiness and feedback will also be achieved with functions that include; location based services, social network integration – and push notifications to capture consumer feedback and insight.

3. More engaged content

To drive customer loyalty, with relevant messaging, the biggest challenge of creating content is generating an experience and narrative that people truly want to engage with. This means to capture an audience’s attention, the quality of copywriting must dramatically increase and become more objective and educative in style. This means the use of great stories that combine with user-generated content, which is particularly helpful as prospects are more likely to be swayed by the word-of-mouth opinion of a micro-influencer – than solely by brand-owned content.

We’re also seeing a much greater focus on long-form, evergreen content that tackle themes or subjects, instead of short to mid-length blogs, featuring various iterations of a key search term. Although long-form pieces may not hit as many high-volume keywords, they should prove more helpful to audiences – which mean better engagement metrics and more shares.

4. Embracing emerging technology

To meet customer demands, especially as their mobile devices become more powerful and social apps integrate better with augmented reality (AR), insurance brands should examine if this tech can help them more effectively engage with consumers. For example, using a customer’s location, brands could trigger sponsored AR content, which can only be accessed at that spot, and at that time.

Other new technologies such as machine-learning algorithms, natural language processing and artificial intelligence (AI) are all coming of age. Early adoption of these solutions, can enable marketers to better predict spend, to optimise their overall budget – and remove entrenched biases in their existing methodologies.

5. Smashing social

When marketers consider interactions with audiences, social media platforms must be embraced more as they provide a great opportunity to solicit and curate content from people who access digital assets. Hashtags, competitions or other forms of invitation to engage should be used to bring in user-generated content, which can then be re-purposed for further marketing outreach. User-generated content is also a very efficient tactic when moderated correctly – to maximise marketing resources – while simultaneously building and strengthening audience relationships.

Industry example  

A major UK insurance company has recently created an insurance broker engagement platform that publishes insurance branded content – as well as aggregating valuable business insight from authoritative web and social channels. This content can be updated up to every 15 minutes and brokers are able to fully personalise the platform to make it more relevant. Users can receive personalised push notifications and e-newsletters – depending on their sector and personal preferences.

With brokers always on the move, the platform’s offline capability allows them to ‘favourite’ articles to read later. Social media integration is also incorporated, enabling brokers to share interesting articles on social channels and via email.  To leverage the opportunity further, a good idea would be to combine custom analytics and flexible integration into a CRM system via an API, this would help turn content into powerful lead generation opportunities.