3 Ways to Create an Audience-First Insurance Marketing Strategy

Insurance policy purchasing is a highly personal and complex process for consumers. From life insurance to jewelry insurance, the buying journey presents multiple detailed considerations: How much coverage do I want? How many people will be included on the policy? Is this a nice to have or a need to have purchase? This complexity is increased by the amount and variety of online and offline touchpoints present within the purchasing process. 

Between an omnichannel buying environment and a growing breadth and volume of policy options within the insurance industry, successful insurance marketing requires putting the wants and needs of your audience first to cut through the noise. We’ve identified three key actions the most sophisticated insurance companies are taking to drive growth through audience-centric strategies. 

3 Audience-Centric Actions for Insurance Marketing

1. Optimizing towards seamless online & offline experiences. 

While insurance purchasing does rely in part on digital efforts, especially during the consideration stage, the data shows that consumers also still rely on offline touchpoints —  like phone calls —  to complete the process. 

For example, Invoca reports that 74% of consumers ran a digital search to research their options prior to purchasing, but that only 25% of those consumers completed the transaction digitally — the rest called to secure the policy with a live agent. And, 62% of consumers report that speaking with an agent is a make or break moment in their purchasing process. 

Understanding audience preferences and behaviors allows you to identify areas where you can leverage cross-functional power within your organization to address both online and offline needs. At Rise, we determine the optimal online and offline touchpoints through a process called connections planning, which is an audience-first analysis that contemplates the consumption behaviors and decision states of different key personas for a brand. Ultimately, this translates to experiences that will be far more authentic and relevant to how your audiences will experience moving through the full sales funnel with your brand.

 2. Cookieless life-event audiences.

Going cookieless is no longer the future — it’s happening now, and it directly affects how marketers approach audience targeting. Consumers want relevant digital experiences, and marketers can deliver on this want in privacy safe ways by tapping into audiences whose behavior aligns with key phases of the insurance purchasing journey — most notably, life events. This is where “walled garden” players can offer relevant and consented targeting data. For example, a home insurance brand can use Amazon DSP to target audiences that Amazon has identified as having a high likelihood of moving homes based on the products those individuals have browsed or purchased on Amazon.com. Or, a jewelry insurance brand seeking to target brides-to-be as they’re planning their wedding can target wedding planning keywords on platforms like Pinterest. 

Understanding which digital spaces your buyer is likely to frequent at the time of a given life event is a great starting point, and we recommend testing multiple cookieless environments to determine which most effectively reaches and engages individuals in that life moment.

3. Completing the closed-loop measurement process.  

Being genuinely audience-centric means knowing how to accurately describe and understand your customers. To do this, you need both a measurement strategy and tech stack that allow you to tie downstream data — like which specific leads actually purchased policies, and at what value — back to earlier marketing touchpoints. Often called “closed loop reporting”, this process allows marketers to better align messaging and also optimize spend based on the end game actions of different audiences. 

The high consideration nature of insurance purchasing means there are often multiple steps and milestones in the sales process, which can create a data headache. In this context, streamlining and leveraging your tech resources to report the right data in the most efficient manner poses a larger challenge. At Rise, we use our proprietary cross-channel media optimization platform, Connex®, to effectively manage and report on the performance of marketing investments across multiple stages of the sales process. These insights enable our marketers to maximize every dollar based on the ads, keywords, and platforms driving downstream business impact. 

Ensuring the Future of Your Insurance Brand Strategies

The landscape of insurance marketing has shifted in multiple ways within the last few years alone — but knowing how to fortify your approaches ensures that you remain audience-centric while gathering data that tells a compelling story. Combining online and offline data, anticipating all things cookieless, and focusing on completing the closed-loop process empowers you to properly future-proof your strategies.