Company overview
Commercial insurance broker Simply Business is the UK’s largest online insurance broker. Launched in 2005, it currently insures over 20,000 SMEs and landlords. As well as offering advice to businesses on selecting the right insurance, Simply Business is also proactive about engaging with its customers. The company takes its social media presence seriously, and has amassed a strong social following rather atypical of its sector. Currently, the @simplybusiness Twitter account has more than 20,000 followers to whom it distributes a regular stream of content.
Challenge
According to the annual Reputational Quotient survey from Harris Interactive, the insurance sector has one of the least positive reputations of all. Only 29% of respondents rate the overall reputation of the insurance sector positively, and it falls behind only tobacco and airlines as the most poorly favoured industries. Add to the mix a general perception of insurance as boring and tiresome, and the task of promoting and marketing an insurance broker website proves somewhat challenging.
Simply Business was struggling to achieve the desired number of visitors to its website and conversion rates were low. An existing marketing strategy which focused primarily on product advertising was quite clearly not delivering.
Strategy
At the start of 2012, Simply Business met to devise a new marketing plan. After initially slow progress, a seemingly simple question was posed: “What is Simply Business?” In what became their Eureka moment, the team finally began to move away from discussions about how to develop content around Simply Business products to a conversation about developing useful content.
An objective was decided upon – to become the small business champion by developing content for small businesses that would help them address their most pressing concerns and challenges.
This represented a significant change in direction for marketing at Simply Business towards producing content that was absolutely unrelated to its insurance product and hence not linked to its product pages. Deep-rooted SEO practices dictate that content creation should be linked with specific company products, even when this tactic hadn’t been working particularly well. Instead, content would now be aligned with the company missions with an emphasis on usefulness; always striving to make the lives of its customers (small business owners) easier.
A strategy was devised based on three key themes that all content should embody: applicability, consistency and usefulness. As well as always adhering to the framework, Simply Business also needed to target what its customers were searching for higher up the funnel.
For its first content campaign, a step-by-step guide for small businesses venturing into social media was created, called “Social Media Success Road Map”. The social media guide was followed with a series of further guides released in succession and always created according to the guiding ACU principles (accessibility, consistency, usefulness).
Results
As an overview, Simply Business has experienced improvements in search engine rankings, traffic and conversion rates since implementing its revised content marketing strategy.
Its first piece of content developed in line with the new strategy, “Social Media Success Road Map”, was immediately easier to pitch than previous product-related content. As well as achieving more than 50 placements (significantly higher than the previous average), the guide also gained serious social traction, with thousands of tweets and likes within two hours of launch. And within just two months, viral activity in the campaign enabled Simply Business to grow its social following by 30%. Organic weekly traffic to its website increased by 25% in April and search visibility spiked.
In terms of social effectiveness, each of the subsequent content campaigns garnered “several thousands” of tweets and Facebook likes.
Moreover, although the new content efforts weren’t focused on Simply Business products, their organic search rankings for product-related terms in Google UK have “improved considerably” over the last six months. Additionally, the company now ranks for the long-tail, top-of-funnel keywords relating to its content pieces that were devised during initial research stages – exposing the brand to new prospects who might not have otherwise heard of Simply Business.
Conversion and retention rates have both improved “significantly” since launching the new content campaign, with overall first visit to buy conversation now 6% higher than it was at the start of 2012. Furthermore, existing customers who have viewed one of the new content guides were as much as 30% more likely to renew their existing insurance policies than those who had not.
BlogStar’s Final Thought:
We’re particularly struck with the last section of the results, which suggests that customers who engage with the Simply Business brand via its useful guides are more likely to spend more on its products and go on to become long-term loyal customers.
Such radical rethinking of an existing marketing strategy can be tricky to execute. You’ll undoubtedly need to present detailed road maps to convince the CEO. Yet the potential to attract new and long-term business by winning customers both earlier in the funnel during the decision-making process and elsewhere with those all-important long-tail keywords is an alluring proposition for any business.
Source: Content Marketing Institute
