I have always been a huge advocate for value marketing. (Value marketing is where you focus your content on enriching your audience’s lives by sharing content that is educating, engaging, and enriching.)
I recently came across an infographic created by HCC Medical Insurance Services and shared by Marketing Sherpa that was so effective it:
- Increased blog traffic by 1,000%
- Increased revenue from email by 96%
- Received more than 2,000 interactions on social media.
- Received an 815% more impressions that their average social media post.
How Did They Do It?
According to Muhammad Yasin, Director of Marketing for HCCMIS, “We had to find new, nontraditional ways to reach our target customers.” Their challenge, which is the same challenge we preach to our agencies, was “turning the ‘boring’ topic of insurance into a piece of content that its customer wanted to view, talk about, and share.”
HCCMIS specializes in travel insurance, so their team decided to create a unique, interactive infographic broken into three different sections (view the infographic here):
Section 1: Anatomy of an Adventure Traveler. As you can see from the picture below, HCCMIS has pop-up buttons next to clothing items to share some of the traveling necessities.
Fig. 1 The Adventure Traveler Infographic
For example, if you click on the pop-up next to the shorts, it provides information on the right-hand side of the page about the best types of shorts and pants to pack on your trip.
According to Yasin, “One of the reasons why people spend so much time on a page with [the interactive infographic is] because there were more and more things to find.”
Section 2: Adventure Quiz. In the Adventure Quiz section visitors can check off various activities to prove their “extremeness.” Then, once they complete the quiz, they can share the results on Facebook or Twitter with their friends.
Fig. 2 Adventure Quiz
Section 3: Bucket List. This section has an interactive map of the world with various extreme activity ideas like wrestling an alligator in Florida or swimming with orcas in New Zealand.
Fig. 3 Bucket List Items
The Process
As you go through the infographic, it’s easy to see that HCCMIS spent considerable time developing the tool, researching the content, and optimizing it to be shared across multiple channels.
According to Yamis, their marketing team spends a considerable amount of time researching interesting and relevant topics to share. In fact, they said they will actually reach out to people interested in potential topics to ensure they are keying in on the most important aspects and focusing on their audience.
The Takeways
For any insurance agency or company looking to interact with prospects in a way that will engage them and lead to future sales, HCCMIS has laid out a great blueprint for success. They embraced technology to create a visually interactive marketing piece that translated into far more sales than they thought were possible.
Here are some suggestions to get your agency started:
1. Be Visual. When creating marketing pieces, the more visual it is, the more success you will have. People are drawn to pictures, graphics, and statistics.
2. Embrace Technology. By creating an interactive infographic instead of a static one and adding social sharing buttons, HCCMIS saw their program go viral.
3. Content. By focusing on content that is relevant to their audience, HCCMIS was able to convert far more prospects into sales.