Summary
It’s not every day you get asked to build a dating website for insurance brokers Arthur J Gallagher International. A long established company in a long established industry.
“Why do we need a website?” they said. “It’s all about personal relationships.”
But their marketing director knew the answer. The audience had changed. While personal relationships were as important today as they always have been, information is more readily available and buyers can search and find what they need, making their own decisions and frequently shortcutting the selection process.
Face-to-face is still the hub of insurance broking (a tradition that started with the Lloyds coffee houses…), so our challenge was how to re-create that up close and personal feel.
The result? A site that is the closest thing to actually meeting someone, without actually meeting them. You could call it a dating site for forging new (business) relationships.
The site’s been live for a month. Unique visitor numbers are up by 400 per cent, and time on site is up by 60 per cent. The business is buzzing.
About the client
A J Gallagher (Arthur J Gallagher International) is the world’s 4th largest wholesale broker.
The company has a long-standing traditional heritage, and a very strong reputation built on the quality of the advice, knowledge and expertise of its people. In fact, the industry is all about people – going all the way back to the days of the Lloyds of London coffee houses where brokers would meet and discuss marine insurance needs, face-to-face. Deals were formed over these meetings and handshakes were contracts.
Today, this essence of trust and individual reputations is maintained in what is a traditional, conservative industry. However, the market had changed, and A J Gallagher International’s enterprising CEO, David Ross, had embarked on an ambitious growth strategy.
He wanted to bring A J Gallagher into the 21st Century. He had succeeded on the business front, but the online presence and brand was lagging far behind. The website needed to be A J Gallagher’s primary shop window and more – a first dialogue with its customers, prospects, industry influencers and staff (existing and potential).
Strategy
Earnest’s strategy for the website and online presence was based around a number of key dynamics:
Alignment to business strategy.
- To represent a growing, international business.
- To help sell our expertise, and our most important asset – our people.
Alignment to customer needs based on audience personas and journey planning
- To ensure the site is constructed and designed to allow fast and easy access to the information needs of each audience persona.
Alignment to internal resources and ‘state of readiness’
- To be constructed with the future in mind – a site that can grow and evolve as the business grows, acquires and internal people become more comfortable in their roles as content creators.
This led to a set of key principles, developed in conjunction with senior stakeholders at A J Gallagher.
Build around them, not us
Being 100 per cent focused on the audience, not internal dynamics and structures.
All about people
This should almost be a ‘dating site’, where audiences can find the people they want to meet and build a (business) relationship with.
Clear and easy-to-use
The audience varied in online sophistication, and we need the site to be completely intuitive.
Never finished
The site will never ‘stop’, we will constantly develop content and features to ensure it becomes a destination people return to.
From this we developed a number of creative territories, which we worked with A J Gallagher to fi ne-tune to a final agreed concept: ‘EYE TO EYE’.
Objectives
Key phase 1 metrics:
- Unique visitors (traffi c)
- Time on site (average duration)
In addition to these over-arching KPIs, we developed audience specific metrics as part of the persona development (see previous).
Phase 2 metrics
- New business leads directly from the site
- Twitter followers
- YouTube hits
- LinkedIn followers
Target audience
Earnest conducted a number of workshops with a cross-section of A J Gallagher stakeholders and subject matter experts. This led to a number of identifi ed target audiences, and personas from
which we developed the user experience of the site.
The audiences were:
- Customers: brokers, retail brokers
- Prospects: brokers, retail brokers
- Press/analysts
- Staff – existing
- Staff – potential recruits
We developed persona-based user journeys for each audience type.
Media, channels or techniques used
Website
The website was constructed on an open source Content Management System (CMS) called SilverStripe (the same web platform used by Barack Obama during his US Presidential election campaign).
Wider web presence
- The site links out to key industry trade publications, associations and industry bodies.
- Content developed for the site is being seeded and provided to these external web portals, improving organic search performance and getting valuable content into a wider sphere than the site itself.
Social media
Phase 2 of this programme is looking at social media, including:
Managed Twitter presence, aimed at:
- Providing the fi nancial press the information they need (83 per cent of journalists use Twitter for information gathering).
- To act as another distribution channel for the valuable content produced by A J Gallagher.
- Engaging with clients and prospects (not all of whom are on Twitter, but some are, and there is a trend even in the insurance sector to employ social media at work…).
- And just as importantly to help the organic search performance of the site YouTube and video.
- For the site launch, over 15 videos of staff were created. This was pivotal to the Eye to Eye concept – the site should be as close to meeting the staff face-to-face as possible.
This is already used by many A J Gallagher staff, and we are leveraging it to
- Provide extensive inbound links.
- To provide a distribution channel for content.
- A company profi le that aligns with the site messaging.
Mobile
A J Gallagher’s ‘8 minute expert’ mobile app works on IPhone and gives its brokers access to the ‘need to know now’ information on everything that A J Gallagher can offer its clients. ‘8 minutes’ because the brokers are time poor and really need some basic information:
- What is the service we offer?
- Why would people buy it?
- Who have we done it for?
- What questions do I need to ask my client?
- Who in Gallagher is an expert at this?
Timescales
The entire project was completed within four months.
Results
Within the first month of launch, the key results were:
- Unique users up by 400 per cent.
- Time spent on site up by 60 per cent.
- YouTube visits, Twitter followers and LinkedIn ‘follows’ are measured as part of Phase 2.
Client testimonial
“Earnest were simply outstanding – they made a highly complex website build and management easy to understand. They fully explained how we would be able to use it as a tool to grow our business, taking into account our specifi c needs. We were also very impressed with their ideas about how to leverage social media. Throughout the process, Earnest have been quick to respond to queries, enthusiastic and eager to please. AJG International would be happy to use them again.” Paul Emuss, Director of Marketing and Communications, AJ Gallagher
