Dramatically Improving Consumer Awareness and Brand Affinity for Esurance
What if... we could use content to accelerate brand visibility in the highly competitive auto insurance market?
Cost-Effectively Improving Brand Visibility and SEO Authority
Esurance, an Allstate subsidiary, is an online insurance company selling car, motorcycle, renters, and homeowners insurance. The company aims to make insurance simple, transparent, and affordable by providing smart products, seamless digital and mobile experiences, and intuitive tools.
As a smaller player in the insurance industry, Esurance was outspent nearly 10-to-1 by industry heavyweights and had only a quarter of the total backlinks of its closest competition. This made it difficult for the company to succeed in its space.
Matching ad spend with the industry giants was not an option, so Esurance needed a cost-effective way to drive brand mentions and backlinks from authoritative sites, build consumer awareness, and increase visibility.
We helped Esurance grow its content marketing from a small program to a thematic, multi-campaign approach. These efforts improved Esurance’s online visibility, but it still needed a way to generate massive media attention, gain valuable high authority links, and build brand credibility.
Innovative, Cost-Effective Content Campaign Backed by Careful Research and Original Data
Esurance wanted to dramatically improve consumer awareness and brand recognition while staying within a limited budget.
We researched a variety of topic areas to find one that would support Esurance’s brand promise: to make insurance and driving simple and transparent.
When examining topics, we looked for ones that were relevant to the target audience and that would generate media interest. After conducting in-depth industry and audience research, we identified a content topic with broad appeal for both drivers and journalists: how modern car technology impacts distracted driving.
We designed and conducted an online survey of more than 1,000 vehicle owners in the US, comparing results of drivers with new in-car tech to those without. Additionally, fifteen interviews were conducted with owners of high-tech vehicles for additional context and to help inform the survey hypothesis and approach.
Using the data, we created an in-depth report on the Esurance website called “Driving to Distraction: Car Tech and the Great Distraction Dilemma”.
The distracted driving content campaign was the breakthrough Esurance needed, generating 95 media hits and 84 links (25% of all on-site content earned links that year). Total potential reach of the coverage was more than 1 billion readers based on traffic data for the publications.
The campaign succeeded in attracting media attention and also served as a proof-of-concept for the client’s future content marketing.
The distracted driving content campaign was the breakthrough Esurance needed reaching more than 1 billion readers through earned media coverage.
Results
High-Volume Media Coverage Lends Credibility and Boosts Visibility
Designed from the ground up to fulfill the objectives of attracting both media stories and significant links, the campaign:
- Reached more than 1 billion readers through earned media coverage
- Generated an additional 6 million impressions through paid promotion
Using original primary research and data, the campaign told a compelling story and also brought attention to a significant problem in the auto insurance industry – distracted driving.
The content’s focus demonstrated that Esurance is concerned about and invested in the safety of its customers, positioning the insurer as trustworthy and credible.
Perficient regularly publishes ground-breaking research studies. Many have become industry benchmarks and have been written about in some of the world’s top media outlets. This commitment to data-driven insights made us the perfect partner to help Esurance reach its business goals.
