Updated on 06/12/2022
Web marketing insurance: towards the digital transformation
Insurance web marketing is constantly evolving, especially in this time of great change for the Insurance industry. In this post, we will look at the 4 areas that insurance marketers will have to follow closely for the future.
We are living in a complicated period, once that is unprecedented in recent history. The outbreak of the global pandemic triggered by COVID-19 is an unpredictable event that is disrupting health systems, economic ecosystems, and our way of life in general, all around the world. It’s also an event that is having an enormous, and as yet unquantifiable, impact on all production sectors.
This moment in time will be a real watershed: we can say it without fear of exaggeration. There will be a “before” and an “after.” And the “after”, of this we are certain, will be a world where Digital Transformation will proceed at an even faster pace. All production sectors have had to implement digital even more deeply into their strategies: from internal processes to smart working, to sales, marketing, and customer relations. It will be a “lesson” that will not be forgotten.
From this unprecedented crisis, new and interesting opportunities may develop: but not for everyone; only for those who know how to recognize and seize them. For those who are not afraid of change. All this is even more valid for a decisive, strategic, and diverse sector such as insurance.
In this post, we will focus precisely on digital marketing for this Industry.
4 decisive aspects of insurance web marketing
We will look at the present and the future, and we will focus on 4 decisive aspects of insurance web marketing that all companies in the sector should watch closely in order to win the market challenges of today and tomorrow.
1. Start with SEO
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” It’s the set of strategies and practices for optimizing an organization’s positioning in the organic results of a website on search engines. To put it another way: when SEO is truly optimized, it’s more likely that visitors will find your company’s web page (but also on specific pages or sections) in the first pages of Google search results.
The way search engine algorithms work is constantly updated, so there is no SEO recipe that is valid for everyone or for all time. It’s no coincidence that many companies today employ full-time SEO experts to make sure its content and pages are constantly optimized for SEO. This alone shows how much it is an increasingly central aspect.
SEO is even more important for the insurance industry. The market itself has expanded, making the offer for consumers wider than ever before. Almost daily, new players, often start-ups that know how to move with great speed and awareness in the digital world, enter the competition. So, getting found on search engines sooner and higher in the results than the competition has become a top priority.
Keep this in mind from a recent Pwc survey: 71% of consumers do digital research before signing a contract with an insurance company (pwc.nl).
2. Social is increasingly at the center
Insurance web marketing is increasingly a matter of social media marketing. The reasons for this are evident, and well summarized by the data below:
- There are more than 2.91 billion monthly Facebook users worldwide, and 2.82 billion people are active daily;
- Instagram, which was born in 2010, has 2 billion active users monthly and growth continues to stop;
- Twitter has 330 million active users;
- Then there is TikTok, a new Chinese social network that has been hugely successful at the younger generation, was launched in September 2016 and has more than 1 billion users. Warning: Generation Z is starting to appear in these years to the insurance market!;
- LinkedIn, which has about 575 million users today. Even this platform, if well exploited, can be very interesting for digital marketing in the insurance sector (source: Oberlo)
In short, more and more people are on social media. They spend more and more time there. It’s where they search for and exchange information. It’s where they look for and offer work. It’s where they discuss topics in specific communities and groups. It’s where they express their preferences. It’s also where, as is often the case, tahe place where users address companies directly. And companies, in turn, must be ready; they must be present in these potential meeting places in the best possible way and with the right tone of voice.
Insurance sector players know this well. And they know that social media is a very delicate and slippery channel. It’s mismanagement, in fact, can lead to disastrous boomerang effects, which spread rapidly from user to user and are almost impossible to stop. How to avoid all this? And how to turn your social channels into a formidable marketing tool?
Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for all types of businesses and companies. But there are some key elements that are the basis of any good social strategy. Here they are:
- Build a recognizable and compelling voice.
- Simultaneously create an image that is coherent and effective (starting with the graphic choices).
- Learn to be as “close” as possible to your audience: this is a fundamental point, and we’ll return to it in the next paragraph.
- In order to be “close,” the first step is to know your target, to know who you are addressing (today, there are multiple tools you can use to do this, which we’ll introduce below), to understand sentiment and identify leads.
- Stimulate the production of UGC (User Generated Content): such content is, without a doubt, the content most capable of triggering the best engagement.
- Implement a video strategy.
Why? Because video is by far the most effective tool in the digital world and in the world of social media, in particular. We’ll focus on video in our final point. According to the Social Media Insurance Monitor study, all of the top 20 companies in the insurance industry are present on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. We’re not surprised!
3. From data-driven to personalization
As we mentioned above, it is more important than ever to be “close” to your audience; to do so requires an in-depth knowledge of them.
Today, there are many tools available to achieve this. In fact, many of these tools offer great precision and are effective even (and especially) when talking about a very large audience of customers, such as insurance companies. These are the tools of data-driven marketing. What are we talking about?
We’re talking about putting tools on track that allow you to collect the digital traces of your actual and potential customers: in short, we’re talking about Big Data analysis. Learning about people’s characteristics, their behaviors, their preferences, their needs. All of this in real time. Once this enormous amount of data has been collected, it’s a matter of interpreting this information in the best possible way, with the help of artificial intelligence and machine-learning systems.
The goal? Break down your audience into increasingly specific segments to target with tailored operations.
Can you go further? Yes: with personalized marketing and Customer Service services, provided by specialized companies such as Doxee. In this way, the target becomes a single person, the dialog becomes truly one-to-one, and loyalty becomes maximum.
In short, this is the frontier of insurance web marketing: personalization. Especially when coupled with video. And this brings us to the final point.
4. Web marketing increasingly revolves around video
Let’s ask ourselves a question: what is the most effective communication tool in the digital world?
We have a very clear answer: it’s video. The numbers say so. And here are some of them:
- it is estimated that, in 2022, 82% of all global internet traffic will come from video streaming and downloading (source: Oberlo);
- people watch a billion hours of YouTube video every day (source: YouTube);
- on Instagram, posts that contain videos record, on average, an engagement higher than 38%, compared to those that contain images;
- when viewing a video, the average user retains 95% of the message it contains; if we talk about texts, this percentage drops to 10% (source: wirebuzz.com);
- 87% of marketers use video in their strategies. And 88% of those who do so are satisfied with the ROI generated by video marketing campaigns (source: Wyzowl).
We could go on and on, and all the data would only give us further confirmation of this fact: there is no more powerful and effective tool than video, if we are talking about web marketing.
But how do you differentiate yourself? How do you overcome the enormous challenge of attention? Again, the answer lies in personalization. The ultimate breakthrough is personalized video.
One example? AXA, an international giant in the Insurance sector, chose to use the services of Doxee to produce personalized and interactive videos to be sent via email to their customers, with the aim of lowering the churn rate. The results of this campaign were impressive.
Transform data into relationships: if you think about it, this is where the heart of the digital revolution lies. And it can be done today. There’s no time to waste!
