I spoke before about the right content marketing strategy being key to winning online, and in particular for inbound ‘intent-led’ search.

In this post, I want to talk about the ‘digital customer experience’ and how one of our clients is creating smart content in their space to get in front of and engage with their customers digitally.

INSURANCE

Insurance is one of those necessary evils in life for most consumers. Car insurance, health insurance — when we think of them, words like ‘expensive’, and ‘poor value’ might come to mind.

We’ve been working with a smart independent online life insurance broker Nick McGowan of Lion.ie.

With life insurance, being covered is important but isn’t mandatory (outside of mortgage protection). But it is very confusing for consumers, there’s a lot to get your head around which makes it difficult to sell, particularly online.

The challenge for Nick in communicating with his consumers is big — and being online, he is competing against the might and budgets of the insurance giants.

“the win that feeds the clients they service comes through the quality of content they produce and their commitment to producing it.”

Designing a digital customer experience.

Lion’s primary goal is simple: grow online enquiries for their services.

But how do you go up against the giants in your industry with limited resources?

The answer lies in what it is that you can do to differentiate your business in your space. Your offering, knowledge, how you work, your content.

In Nick’s case, Lion is an independent broker meaning they are not tied to any one insurance provider. This gave them an advantage in that they could talk openly about the market.

So the strategy was also simple:

use content to answer the questions and problems that people have with life insurance and serious illness. And in a way that is informative, easy to understand and often funny and engaging.

Here are 3 simple things that work so effectively:

Informative: the content explains and demystifies life insurance. It answers broad and specific problems that people may have. An automated email series gives you a free ‘mini-course’ on the subject.

Easy to understand: content is written in honest, plain English — no mystery. This helps create trust with the reader. There are also handy audio versions of many posts.

Humour: content is light-hearted, and witty which helps make it even more engaging. This post on how brokers get paid — is a nice example. It uses humour (and mild profanity) to help inform and demystify this subject in a way that again, helps connect with the user and create trust.

The result of this strategy sees Lion.ie ranking in the top 5 or 6 search results for ‘life insurance’ queries in one of the most competitive sectors — a real-life David and Goliath story.

Essential components of Digital Customer Experience

This is how we describe what user experience means in simple terms— it’s what it feels like to use a service, a product, or a system.

There are 3 parts to a comprehensive user experience:

Aesthetic experience
This is what it looks like to engage with your organisation. Your brand, your product design — the quality of your website’s design and layout for example.

Functional experience
How well does your service work? Again, on a digital channel— does your website load fast, can I make contact, make an application online, make a purchase, etc.

Experience Design
Experience design is a critical part that most organisations miss.

It isn’t enough anymore to just look good (aesthetic) and work well (functional). Experience design is emotive — it is where we consider what it feels like to engage in a product or service.

In a digital scenario, this can be a challenge, as you can’t touch or smell the experience. How is your product or service described on digital channels? What do others say about what you do?

The clearest evidence of what it feels like to work with Lion is in the testimony of their customers through online reviews and feedback — this is key to the digital customer experience.

This feedback creates trust and makes it easier for customers to make a decision to choose Lion when they’re looking for their services.

Lion.ie have been picking up awards all over for the quality of the service they provide, but the first win that allows them to service those clients comes through the quality of content they produce and their commitment to producing it.

As this writer will confess, committing time and effort to produce quality, relevant content is not easy — but it is an essential ingredient in building a digital customer experience and with the right strategy, the results will come.

If you are serious about creating a strategy for your customer experience, talk to us, we’d love to help.

To learn more about Lion’s content, have a look at their Blog: www.lion.ie/blog.

Thank you for reading.