Digital Marketing for the Insurance Industry. Don’t outspend your competitors, outsmart them.

Generating insurance leads online isn’t about outspending your competitors, it’s about outsmarting them.
Article last updated: December 2019

Introduction
Ahead of our insurance marketing insight event at Google HQ, held in partnership with outstanding web development agency Kyan, we took a look at the top digital priorities for insurance marketers and how they can maximise paid search returns in a competitive sector.

What changes do insurance marketers need to be aware of?
The relentless growth of mobile use means an out-of-date website has become a liability. Google, whose share of the search market is 87.96% (Oct, 2019), has prioritised “mobile first” result delivery, meaning that now those occupying space on page one will be the cream of the mobile-optimised crop: Fast-loading, relevant content content and finger-click friendly navigation, just to name a few essential requirements.

Regardless of future changes, a seamless mobile experience is very important for Google Ads campaign optimisation now, as Google uses metrics about users’ on-page behaviour to judge the quality of the content provided. A poor experience translates to a poor “quality score” meaning ads will be shown on search result pages less regularly.

This limits the potential returns from what is by far the most profitable route to growth for insurance businesses online; using paid search to get your product in front of users who are researching their options and most importantly, are already in a transaction mindset.

Google Ads’ cost-per-clicks for the insurance and finance industries are well known to be high, the below sample of popular insurance keywords have an average CPC of £18.83.

Running a profitable Google Ads campaign
Fountain Digital Marketing Consultant and Paid Search expert Ruth Barton explains the make-or-break factors for high-CPC search campaigns:

Specificity

• Avoid generic advertisements: Write them specifically for each ad group.
• Focus on high-return keywords only, by regularly running an 80/20 analysis. The Pareto Principle, or the “law of the vital few” states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This applies particularly to keywords as a small number of top-performing keywords will achieve the greatest returns. These should be prioritised for the split-testing of copywriting and design across adverts and landing pages.
• Create separate campaigns for high performing keywords for a greater degree of control.

Relevance

• As a result of the points above, ads are as relevant as possible to the search queries they appear for, increasing click-through rate which decreases cost in a competitive sector.
• We’ve found that interruption marketing through social media, where adverts are relevant to the user’s profile but not necessarily to their immediate needs, is not a reliable source of ROI for the insurance sector compared to paid search. Where platforms like Facebook and Twitter do come in useful however, is remarketing; encouraging users who have viewed a product on your site to return and complete an action. This is because remarketing clicks are cheap compared to other types of social media campaign, and the user is already familiar with your brand.

Quality Control

• Daily checks: High spending campaigns should be checked on a daily basis allowing for quick responses to changes in competition from other advertisers, as well as technical issues

Remarketing
With free impressions and clicks as low as 10p, remarketing through Paid Search, Social Media and the Google Display Network is a cost-effective channel for maximising conversions by keeping your product front-of-mind. It also creates an excellent opportunity to increase the lifetime value of existing customers by moving them from one product funnel to another.

This is especially relevant for the insurance industry where an insurer may have several products that become relevant to a customer at different stages of their life.

Remarketing works by creating a list of visitors who have been to a certain page on a website. This is usually used to show users ads about the product they were viewing to encourage them to return and complete an action. However, remarketing can also be used as a cheap way to introduce existing customers and users who have not converted to other products that may become relevant to them in the future. This is especially effective if you have a wealth of high-quality informational content about your products that addresses the potential concerns of your customers.

Consider at which point each of your products becomes relevant to your target audience and build a strategy accordingly, like the very simple example below.

Advertisers can specify whether remarketing lists should collect users from product pages on their website, informational content such as blog posts, or both, provided it’s all highly relevant to the ads the users are being shown.

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Thank you for reading this article, we hope you have found it useful!

If you have any questions about the techniques discussed, use the contact form at the bottom of the page to get in touch or visit our Facebook page.

Google Events
Fountain and selected industry partners deliver sector specific digital marketing insight events, held every few months at Google’s Kings Cross headquarters.