Where brokers can’t travel, their brand can.
There’s a widely (and mistakenly) held belief among many commercial insurance businesses that the more complex the insurance, the less you need marketing because it all depends on relationships. This campaign turned that belief on its head.
Alesco had seen a decline in the number of enquiries coming from their U.S. retail broker clients as a result of the pandemic. Despite having good relationships, with no travel allowed, and no other brand presence, it was a case of out of sight, out of mind.
To revive awareness and boost consideration, we developed a highly targeted campaign of eight thought leadership articles that positioned Alesco as the forward-looking experts.
Positioning Alesco not just for the retail broker, but for their clients
Researching the kind of content wholesale brokers are publishing revealed that most of it is pure B2B, focusing on topics narrowly of interest to retail brokers, like insurance rates and claims.
Rather than compete in that same space, we appealed to retail brokers by creating B2B2C content that spoke to them in the context of what mattered to their energy, cargo and construction clients. The thinking was that it would not only demonstrate to retail brokers the depth of knowledge Alesco has about their clients’ industries but would also give them talking points for their client conversations, helping to reinforce their own role as risk management consultants.
We called the campaign “Scope the Future” to position Alesco as the insurance partner that can connect the macro economic, technological and insurance trends coming our way to the operational risks large businesses are, and increasingly will be, facing.
Three channels working side-by-side to generate awareness, and turn it into something more.
We used LinkedIn to create broad awareness, Slipcase to generate engagement, and the Alesco website to turn that awareness into consideration.
As the campaign progressed, we noticed, and changed, two things.
First, the LinkedIn audience was primarily watching the first 25% of the videos. Since we started each video by introducing the “Scope the Future” series we were satisfied that these were creating Alesco brand impressions, but many were missing the topic we were focusing on in that post, impacting our ability to fulfil our positioning objective. We addressed this by switching the edit around to lead with the topic, and close by wrapping it up as part of the series.
Second, we saw that the content was performing well better and better as time went on, so, towards the end of the campaign, we tested turning articles into lead generators by putting the content behind a form.
Surpassing targets, winning business, changing minds
The effectiveness of the campaign far exceeded client expectations and insurance industry norms. The campaign not only ensured Alesco dominated share of voice on the topics we chose, but generated new leads, new quotes, and closed business for an ROI of at least 5:1 and a $10m+ lifetime value pipeline. All that from a campaign that was mainly designed to raise brand awareness.
Here’s how the campaign results break down:
327,000 impressions
1,235 engagements
+185% website session duration
+20% LinkedIn followers
8 MQLs
6 quotes
5:1 ROI for what was primarily an awareness campaign