Income Protection and Digital Marketing

In this video, Georgia d'Esterre, Head of Marketing at Holloway Friendly shares some ideas on how to use digital marketing to promote income protection.

Here's the transcript of the video if you'd prefer to read it.

Digital marketing is an incredibly powerful tool that every UK protection provider should consider using to better engage with their customers and advisers. Not utilising the digital world to the best of your ability can severely limit your voice and hinder your reach ultimately harming your business.

Many of us working in protection are guilty of shunning digital marketing instead relying on more traditional methods like face to face communications, print ads, and tele-marketing. And was these can still work and shouldn't be forgotten about, these strategies can be outdated and more could be done to improve engagement with both customers and advisers. As an industry, we need to get better at embracing the 21st century.

We're new to digital marketing ourselves. In just 18 months. Holloway Friendly is going from no marketing function at all to being fully committed to digitising the way in which we speak to our members advisers and how we represent ourselves.

We still embrace our traditional marketing channels and communications, but we introduced digital marketing channels to sit alongside these launching social media platforms on Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook. We find LinkedIn is a great place to speak to industry professionals, whereas Facebook and Twitter is more consumer facing. Since the launch of these channels, we have seen our followers increase and our engagement with members improve, reaching over 400,000 people and getting 32,000 engagements. This move has led to many new advisers flocking to our website. Social media content should always be punchy and relatable. Assets created, especially for your channels, be this in video format or a still image will appeal to your followers and encourage them to click onto other related links.

Video content is especially powerful on social media channels, when communicating with the masses, they need to be short, ideally no longer than two minutes long, and a mixture of styles like talking heads or animation to help reach a wider audience.

We created successful videos including three instructional videos that aim to help advisers with their clients. These videos provided our advisers with information about us as a company, whilst also giving them actionable useful tips. Alongside these adviser facing short instructional videos, we have created an animation for advisers that shows the underwriting journey that an application follows. This highlights how our underwriters are always there for them throughout the application and that they can keep things quick and simple.

Video testimonial clips are also invaluable. We told the story of Diana, one of our members in our video format which inform potential members and customers how we helped her cope when she suffered from burnout and depression. The story documents, how we helped Diana through the claims process and supported her when she was unable to work. Videos like this prove to existing members that they will be well looked after if they were in a similar situation and attracts consumers who may not have thought about income protection before.

Personal stories like Diana's can also attract press attention with her story featuring on publications such as the Daily Express and MSN. Email campaigns that are specific and targeted at advisers at different stages of their relationship with us are an incredibly useful way of communicating and sending relevant call to actions. This method of marketing ensures that our advisers know that we are fully engaged with the claims process and reminds them that we are there for them throughout the entire process of doing business with us. Webinars also translate fantastically in the the UK protection industry. We do these on a one to one basis with advisers to show how easy it is to use us as well as on a wider platform like the Webinar we recently carried out with Cover. Webinars are a fantastic way to keep advisers and customers involved in your business whilst also portraying your competence.

Every society wants to increase their membership and make themselves more accessible to advisers and to do this you need to be noticed. The UK protection industry still hasn't completely realised the importance of link building campaigns and increasing SEO (search engine optimisation). We created online tools and calculators that we host on our site to encourage publications to link through to so that their readers can check them out. Ensuring that you have useful information on your website is also important to drive traffic and encourage back links. We have a document library which includes key items of collateral that can be printed and downloaded by advisers to use with their clients. These documents demonstrate how important income protection is and raises awareness of the product. The launch of our rebrand, Holloway Friendly, Keeping Life Colourful, so a complete re-skin of the website and tied in the launch of new social media channels.

Many protection companies in the UK seem to be afraid to update their image, but we deemed it absolutely necessary to ensure we are providing the best service for our members and advisers. The rebrand received great press coverage through the use of press releases in key financial service publications like FT Adviser and Cover. PR is an absolute must, if you're looking to increase brand awareness, grow your member base and improve SEO. Through data releases, announcement releases and case studies, we have achieved coverage on both industry and national publications, reaching millions of potential customers are making consumers aware of the importance of income protection.

The moves we have made as a society into the digital age has seen our unprompted awareness to double in less than six months, and our consideration by advisers has increased by 7%. This just goes to show how powerful digital marketing is and why you should embrace it in your business.