Grow your customer base from your website

We helped our client, Direct Insurance London Market (a Lloyds broker),  to develop their website and revamp the latest news area of it to make it work much harder in building ongoing relationships with their existing customer base whilst also attracting a new audince to further engage with and then eventually convert them into customers.

Looking at ‘news’ in a whole new way to attract and grow customers

 

On many websites the ‘Latest news’ area of a website is written purely from the client point of view in showing off and promoting just exactly what they have been up to from a PR perspective. Ie. Promoting a company announcement or event they have attended. And this was the case with the ‘latest news’ area of the previous incarnation of the DILM website.

However this way of writing content for a ‘latest news’ section is limited and is only really of interest to the most enthusiastic of customers, internal employees or to show credibility to potential customers.

To really drive engagement with existing and new customers it’s key to write content in terms of what will appeal to your target audience. More often than not, content of an educational, useful, interesting or fun nature will keep your audience engaged and coming back for more – and an engaged adience gives you scope to do a lot more in up-selling and cross-selling services.

 

INTRODUCING THE DILM BROKER HUB – a HUB for useful content

 

The first task for our client was renaming their ‘latest news’ area into the ‘Broker Hub’. This symbolised the move away from just sharing latest news & business announcements, to providing useful and educational articles, tips, guides & resources for their target audineec of Insurance brokers all in one place, hence the term ‘Hub’ (we know it’s an often used term, but it works well in this instance!)

We’ve actually done the same on our Reactive website, with our ‘Hub’ area, where we also share interesting articles and resources to help you grow your knowledge such as this article! This manner of writing content, with the audiences needs in mind works well, and the proof is that you are still reading this article a syou are interetsed in it’s contents! If we only shared latest news about Reactive Design, say our latest company announcement or award, then you may have switched off by now, but because the contents of this article are useful to you, you keep reading (hopefully 🙂

 

KEY COMPONENTS OF THE BROKER HUB

 

The Broker Hub on the DILM website in particular consists of many modules to help drive engagement and build relationships with their Insurance Broker audience, such as:

  • Bespoke search functionality by Topic & Type to make it easy to find information of relevance
  • Content displayed by recency, most popular and editors picks
  • Gamification of some content via the clients own ‘Fantasy Football’ league – it’s important to bring a bit of fun into content
  • A module to cross-sell the ‘download’ of their corporate brochure
  • A module to explore further topics to drive deeper engagement
  • Up-sell module focussing on audience benefits and ‘why to partner with DILM’
  • Finally a ‘sign-up’ subscription module to get the latest content delivered ‘direct to your inbox’ which further enables DILM to market to their growing audience and potential customers

 

“Education is all a matter of building relationships & building bridges”

Ralph Ellison

ADVANCED SEARCH FUNCTIONALITY

 

With our client now aiming to create content of a highly useful & interesting nature, across a whole host of engaging topics to their audience, this resulted in many types of content being created such as:

  • Articles
  • Guides
  • Case studies
  • Videos

Because of the varied amount of content we developed a bespoke search functionality that enabled the user to select which topics & types of content they wanted to see, so the ‘Broker Hub’ area would filter the content displayed based on a user’s particular interest – in effect becoming personalised to the users needs and interests. (See the screenshot below showing this selection functionality):

FILTER BY MOST POPULAR & EDITOR PICKS

 

As well as displaying content via recency, content was also promoted via ‘most popular’ and ‘editors picks’ which gave our client chance to push certain content types.

DRIVE further ENGAGEMENT WITH MORE TOPIC areas

 

Due to the sheer amount of information on the ‘Broker Hub’ there is a module which further promotes  other engaging topics of interest to the target audience. And under that is another module that promotes the benefits of DILM and their services.

CROSS-SELL BROCHURE DOWNLOAD

 

Although the majority of content is focussed around being educational, informative and interesting, there is still room to be a touch more salesy and cross-sell the corporate brochure.

Once you have engagement – develop the relationship and ask your customers to sign-up for more!

 

Finally – because visitors to the Broker Hub now trust it as a source of useful content, they are more willing to want to keep using it and not miss out on future relevant content, so this provides an excellent opportunity to ask people to subscribe to the email newsletter to continue getting relevant content. This also gives an opportunity down the line to cross-sell and up-sell services in the email newsletter, and in doing so convert leads into customers. 

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