CheezeDMG Blog

Insurance is recession-proof, but your marketing message is not.

Any research, customer surveys, behavioural studies into how people shop and behave online, pre-August 2008 is irrelevant to how online marketing will unfold in 2009. A bold and some might say rash statement, but the key in 2009 will be to keep the customers you’ve got and to attract the ones who are worried. Reassurance, trust, solidity will need to be the ‘moods’ reflected by search results to convey the right message and persuade the consumer that you’re the insurer for them.

As soon as they mentioned the ‘R’ word, it became a whole new ball game.

Insurance is essentially a recession-proof sector, so you need to keep spending but you need to do it more effectively than ever.

We all know that everybody needs insurance. It’s not a nice-to-have, or on anyone’s wish list, it’s a necessity. For that reason (amongst others), people don’t enjoy buying insurance. A few people might, but they probably enjoy making lists and using a ruler.

The key to selling insurance online effectively in 2009 will be the usual price-point promotions but, crucially, these will need to be coupled with the reassurance that your service can be relied upon in an ‘unstable’ economy. Brands will win the day and, if you’re not one, then your message will need to be all the more engaging.

How to win clicks and influence people:

How do we gain cut-through? How do we beat our competitors to the customers?

By influencing people. Don’t just do marketing by numbers, say something worth hearing and you will be heard. Engage the consumer on their terms and you will succeed. The age-old mistake is for the industry to talk in their own language about ‘motor insurance’ online (135,000 searches per month on Google) when everyone is searching for ‘car insurance’ (5,000,000 searches). Next year will be about more than just car insurance. You need to start optimising now for the search terms that people will be typing in in Q2 next year. And if you’re not up there already, then you need to go niche.

How do people find you? What do they type into the search engines and, more importantly, what do they mean? Don’t get lost in a semantic field.

Think of the person, not the policy. Ensure you are focussing on the key issues that are, and will be, affecting the market. Develop advisory content that discusses the lean financial times; what measures consumers can take to ensure they are financially secure. How will the financial situation affect them? They need to look after the fundamentals; insure the home, protect the second most valuable thing they own, the car, and protect their valuables. Appeal to this with new and fresh content around financial security, protecting the financial cornerstones of your consumers’ lives.

Simple things like focussing on single-trip travel insurance as we can assume that fewer holidays will be taken, and ensuring that you refocus your annual travel insurance on European trips as those who do make several trips might stay closer to home. Surround your core products and services with highly relevant, consumer-centric content. They want to feel like they’re buying into an insurer that knows exactly what is going on in the financial markets and is fortified against any eventuality.

The search engines will continue to be the key battle ground, but not as we know it. Service-led searches and cover-specific questions will increase as the more established demographic focuses on what they are getting for their money. At the same time, and rather unsurprisingly, price point will become more important than ever to the majority of consumers in the insurance purchase process.

So there will be a split in how and who you sell to, but with a wide, blurred line merging the two. Getting your message and proposition right will make or break your success online as new potential customers start to shop around.

A whole new audience

Silver surfers are recognised to be one of the fastest-growing demographics online. And those who have been with the same insurer for years will awaken and they will be there for the taking, online, ‘eager’ to be influenced. Movement online to ‘get the best deal’ will increase and aggregators will have more of an influence than ever. However, consumers will want to remain in control and activity will increase as they continue to search and research. ‘How much will aggregators feature in the consumer purchase cycle?’ The answer is likely to be somewhere between ‘a lot’ and ‘even more’. But the real question is what role will they play? Will consumers continue to convert through price comparison websites, or will they increasingly use them for research and then go directly to the insurer?

The role of aggregators: price comparison, search marketing, display advertising, eCRM will all play a part. For more thoughts on the role of aggregators in the insurance industry, check out Jamie Riddell’s blog post and presentation.

So Google’s putting us in charge of relevancy. Or rather it’s putting however many active gmail users in charge of their own results, which might vaguely affect other gmail users’ results.

As an incoming link to a website is a ‘vote’ for relevancy, so now, we can comment on a site in the search listings and other geeks, ahem, users can read it and decide what they want to do. Is the site relevant? Is it irrelevant? Do we care? Does a site’s appearance in the SERPs rile us so much that we feel we need to ban it from any future search listings for the specific search we’ve just conducted?

Grant Sterling of SearchEngineLand.com was quoted generously by BBC Tech but the key point made by him was down to one tiny little word:  “So this could be quite dramatic if they get a lot of people participating…”. Did you get it? No buts…

I’m lucky enough to know quite a lot of brilliant geeks. We need them, they’re brilliant (some are quite successful too, but I don’t know them). And it is the people who get excited every time Google sneezes that might engage with the SearchWiki for a while. It’s been blogged that Google’s only in this for the data and to learn more about how people interact with the search results. No surprise that Google aren’t in this for the fun of it. But will they really learn anything about the wider consumer?

Personalised search in various forms has been discussed for a long time. But this isn’t it. If it’s personalised for me, fine. If I have to do the personalising, that’s time I could have spent clicking on sites or doing another search. It’s encouraging us to edit the results for ourselves, but surely the point of Google’s algorithm is to offer up the most relevant sites? So why are they asking us to tamper with it? Do they not think they’re doing a good enough job?

So it’s about encouraging social engagement, commentary, reviews, opinion, feedback. Lovely. But what happened to the 1.8 second rule? The time you have to grab the attention of the searcher before they click (I’ll try and remember where I heard this but don’t ask me). You need to (forgive the phrase) ‘win the click’ through immediate relevancy and a strong message. If I’m in search mode, I’m not going to stop and click through to comments on whether I should click on a site or not. I’m going to read the summary/title/url, then my decision’s made. Then I’ll click on the site, decide it’s not relevant, and click back to the results cursing their meta description for fooling me…won’t we all?

It’s a 0:0 draw in the (mis)match between social media and big brands, as both seem to have lost out. Quite why brands are in a battle with social media in the first place is the question. There are doubtless going to be posts and comments all over the online world saying how Mattel / Hasbro have missed an open goal here (and I’ll stop the embarrassing footie analogy while I’m behind).

Scrabble was a bored board game, languishing alongside the Yahtzee in your Mum and Dad’s caravan in Yarmouth, and Scrabulous revived it. It should be hailed as the hero of the board game, revitalising a stagnant market and making games companies sit up and take note (we could even play games online, although I’m not sure there’s a market in it). Mattel / Hasbro shouldn’t be pulling it, they should be buying it, branding it, and sticking it on lunchboxes all up and down the land (or at least the digital equivalent of lunchboxes, like Bebo, Facebook and Messengers across the world). My point is simple (thankfully), Scrabulous was the most successful Facebook app of all time and ad space on or around it should have been like gold dust given the amount of time people were dedicating to it.

The transition from traditional board game to engaging, up-to-the-minute success has always been a tricky one. McDonald’s have tried the board game route with the ever-baffling Monopoly-on-your-food-carton giveaway, numerous other board game-style offerings are successfully launching themselves into mobile gaming and the Nintendo DS is doing sterling work with Brain Training in getting the Countdown Conundrum generation hooked on more numbers and letters than Carol Vorderman could shake a board rubber at.

So scrapping Scrabulous is a missed opportunity (no surprises to this ramble I’m afraid), although it would be interesting to see what people are going to do with their time now. Productivity levels are going to increase. Maybe someone’s going to have the time to come up with the next brilliantly simple Facebook app? Or maybe everyone’s sitting their revising their two letter words and Bingos for when Mattel / Hasbro realise their mistake, write the Scrabulous guys a cheque and get them to re-launch with some media support in the form of Scrabulous-branded lunchboxes…