Since launching from a blank sheet of paper in January 2020, the content marketing agency CopyHouse has gone from strength to strength, carving out a niche of supporting businesses looking to set themselves apart when it comes to attracting and retaining the interest of customers.
Now boasting a team of 25 people and an impressive roster of clients – among them many familiar insurance brands including Cigna and Instanda – founder and CEO Kathryn Strachan (pictured) understands the challenge facing businesses who set themselves that ambition. Assessing the willingness of insurance businesses to embrace the full potential of content marketing, she noted the discrepancy between the B2C and B2B sectors of the market.
“B2C is always more advanced, and especially so in insurance which is a bit more traditional and hasn’t been disrupted as much as, say, the financial services industry with fintech,” she said. “Insurtech brands have shaken up the market but not to the same extent as financial services which is almost oversaturated with fintech companies. That’s putting a fire under traditional financial services to get up to speed with their marketing and focus on competing digitally.
“Insurance is really in the early days of what the financial services landscape was like when fintech came on the scene,” Strachan said. “I think insurance providers are starting to be more savvy and to think digitally but, with a few notable exceptions, I think they’re rather late to the game and there’s a lot more work that needs to be done.”
Insurance companies are fighting a war on two fronts when it comes to fully embracing the power of content marketing – their traditionally risk-averse approach to innovation and the long-standing reputation of insurance as a ‘grudge purchase’. Insurance is not considered a “fun” purchase for most customers, Strachan said, and also there’s not much of a real relationship between an insurance holder and an insurance brand until the point of a claim.
She highlighted that insurance businesses need to focus their attention and resources on building better customer relationships. She also emphasised the opportunity these businesses have to place greater focus on educating and supporting insureds to mitigate their risks which will allow them to become more proactive than reactive partners in the insurance process and so change the nature of these relationships.
The CopyHouse team have a myriad of ways to support bridging the gap between where the reputation of insurance as a product stands today and where it needs to be, Strachan said, and at the centre of this mission is creating accessible content – and ensuring that it’s targeted correctly.
“I call it fishing where the fishes are,” she said, “Once you know who your audience is, you can then identify where they're already spending time online. It's a lot easier to catch a fish if you go to where the fish are rather than trying to get the fish to come to you. If you know your audience, you know what publications they’re reading, what social media channels they’re accessing and how they’re receiving information. Then you can design a campaign around that.”
For CopyHouse, it all begins with defining the audience, their pain points and what they need to cut through the noise, she said, not just to help customers better understand the landscape but also to encourage them to want to work with the brand. It's about creating content that talks to an audience the way they want to be talked to, through the channel they want to be reached through, which is why taking a bespoke approach is so infinitely more valuable than a one-size-fits-all campaign.
It's interesting to see how the marketing landscape has reshaped itself in the aftermath of the COVID crisis, she said, because the pandemic obliged even the most traditional businesses to really start understanding the digital landscape and the need to embrace it. Companies that didn’t have a digital component to their brands felt the brunt of the crisis and, in its wake, there is increased recognition of the value digital processes can bring to a business.
“The pandemic also made us a lot more global, generally speaking,” she said. “Being global allows you to market and to sell to audiences in markets where you might not actually have boots on the ground, which is a massive advantage. So, I think we’ve seen the advantages of being digital over the past few years. What I’m hoping is that now things are going back to being more in-person, a lot of the lessons that we learnt during the pandemic aren’t lost.”
There’s been a big push to return to in-person events and for people to go back to the office over the last year, Strachan said, but most good marketers recognise the value of both options and are looking to perfect that balance between in-person and digital events. Looking forward, she is confident that there will be a happy medium reached which reflects that a blended and more selective approach works best.
For insurance businesses looking to get started on a rejuvenated content strategy, she has a lot of valuable advice.
“The first place is always your website - make sure that’s up to scratch, because that’s going to be the foundation of all your digital marketing – everything you do will lead somebody back to your site,” she said. “You can see that a lot of insurance businesses have websites that look like they’re from the 1980s, so make sure that’s in a good place, to start with, and then it’s about building it up from there.
“Social media normally offers quite a quick win for companies that are just getting started, as it’s often easier to get off the ground than having long-form pieces. Creating a strategy helps. A lot of companies want to do marketing but don’t actually have a strategy. But having a detailed strategy gives you visibility, it acts as your map as go on this journey. So, for me, it’s about nailing the strategy, identifying your audience and making sure the foundational basics like having a good website are there.”
For more recommendations on how to craft a great content strategy, you can listen to the free CopyHouse podcast ‘Tech Marketers Uncorked’ here. Tune in today for further insight from Kathryn Strachan and the CopyHouse team today.
