5 Easy Steps to Creating a Digital Marketing Plan for the Insurance Industry

Digital marketing can be tricky for the insurance industry, especially for providers that offer multiple insurance products. There are several reasons for this, ones you’re probably well-acquainted with, but we’ll list them out anyway:

• The insurance industry is a cluttered space in digital marketing today
• The target audience can be hazy at best and spans large age groups that aren’t necessarily purchasing plans for themselves
• Agents have always played a large role in the decision making, and though the dependency has reduced now, they still tend to be the last touchpoint in the buying cycle
• Having multiple products might mean multiple marketing teams, all using one set of platforms for one brand that should sound cohesive

All of these hurdles can be addressed with digital marketing. All you need a solid marketing plan and an agile team that’s familiar with marketing technology. Stick with us through this blog post and you’re halfway there.

To break the strategic process down for you, we’re listing out
5 easy steps to creating your insurance marketing plan:

Highlights: 5 Easy Steps to Creating a Digital Marketing Plan for the Insurance Industry

1

Know Your Audience

2

Know Your Competition

3

Create Your Media Plan

4

Prepare your marketing/
ad collaterals

5

Set up your tracking &
reporting formats

 

• Know Your Audience

  Based on the insurance products you offer, you’ll have different types of audiences. Because of the nature of insurance marketing, you won’t be able to segment your target audience simply based on demographics but will have to dig deeper into psychographics and behavioural segmentation to properly identify and target your audience.

  Understanding the path-to-purchase:
  You’ll also have to understand your audiences’ path-to-purchase for each product you offer. For the sake of an example let’s say you’re creating a health insurance marketing plan - specifically for a comprehensive health insurance product that you offer - and need to boost your digital sales this quarter. There will be a different path to purchase each segment of the TG takes to buy the same product. A middle-aged married man will probably be looking for a floater plan and you’d want to start his journey with a family-focussed display ad, whereas a younger woman in her late 20s might be searching for “ways to save tax” when she comes across your search ad.

  Having each segment of you TG mapped out and understanding different ways in which they will come across your product and different ways in which you can place your product in their path, will start you off on the right note.

• Know Your Competition

  Creating unique campaigns
  The insurance marketing space is very cluttered, and with legalities requiring you to be wary of what you say and how you say it, brands often end up running similar campaigns. Research what your competition is doing, not only so you may get inspired but more importantly, in this industry, so you don’t accidentally plan a campaign in a similar space.

  Building great user experiences
  It’s also always a good idea to draw inspiration from around the world when creating user experience - the industry demands that you have an easy-to-use website that will help users swiftly calculate their premium and sign up for a plan. Check out what the most modern insurance companies in the world have up their sleeve and use their learnings to build your own.

  Differentiating your product
  The most important reason to research your competition, is because your audience most definitely will be. No policyholder buys an insurance plan without researching his options first. Staying up-to-date on what the competition has to offer allows you to differentiate your product effectively.

• Create Your Media Plan

  Analyse where audiences in each of your target segments are spending time online, and allocate budgets accordingly. You’ll have a lot of learnings once campaigns go live, so we’d recommend analysing and optimising along the way. You can also set up growth experiments - an approach we use with growth marketing that involves first using a small part of your budget to run campaign experiments, and then only scaling what works.
  Keep in mind, here again, that different segments of your audience might be frequenting different platforms altogether, so you’ll need to create a media plan accordingly.

• Prepare Your Collaterals

  Prepare your collaterals - landing pages, ad creatives as per your media plan, content marketing collaterals (don’t forget your remarketing creatives too!), email marketing assets, etc. You’ll want to go over points 1 and 3 in detail here and make sure you’re creating communication that will speak to each of your segments at each stage of the buying journey.

  Pro tip: We’ve found that creatives with people work the best across all insurance products, and targeting each segment with communication specific to their needs/problems keeps the CTR high and CPC low.

• Set Up Your Tracking & Reporting Formats

  Have reporting formats ready to track the effectiveness of each advertising platform, analyse where users are dropping off in the journey on your landing page, and where they’re engaging with your ads/webpage and getting you great returns. This tracking should be done on a daily basis with weekly reports shared within the team, so you can quickly turnaround the campaign as needed!

  Expert insight: Popular drop off points will be the homepage, the premium calculator and the sign-up form, so plan accordingly.

These 5 steps should have you well on your way to executing a successful insurance marketing plan. A lot of it does depend on the expertise and experience of your digital team so if you need help getting started, or along the way, feel free to reach out to our digital marketing experts!