From digital strategy to thought leadership

CHALLENGE How can we help NN become thought leader in the sector of life insurances, through a data-driven marketing approach? We started with a thorough strategic analysis that allowed us to map various NN platforms and clarify their purpose. Once the strategic plan was ready, we further worked on UX optimization and content marketing. Guiding NN from strategy to system and scale. Let us walk you through the entire process in 6 short steps.

1. Defining the digital landscape

The NN digital landscape was very fragmented into several platforms. With a couple of strategic workshops, we managed to shape this more clearly and defined each platform’s purpose regarding the customer journey. When you know which platform serves which goal, strategic decisions such as budget allocations are well-grounded and easier to make.

2. Generating traffic with content marketing

Thought leadership is an excellent way to reach the right audience and to establish a relationship with them. By reaching people with good content, you bring them one step closer in their customer journey towards engagement and conversion. And this method clearly pays off. At least 72% of all website visits goes to the NN blog page.

Luckily, NN already has good content, so we focused on setting up the distribution plan. This way, we made sure that the existing content reaches the right audience, both organic and paid. With such a strategic content planning, we make sure there is a constant flow of good content, going from white papers to easy digestible, current news. To make sure there’s enough variation, we sometimes test new formats like snackable videos or blog posts. Also, we started capturing data for a monthly newsletter, based on the type of client in order to send segmented info.

3. Coordinating media strategy and planning

Each quarter, we take the media planning of a campaign for our account. This fall for instance, we’re supporting NN with the retirement campaign ‘En ze leefden nog lang en gelukkig?’. This fun campaign is being promoted by means of a unique fairy tale book that makes people contemplate their future. When receiving the campaign’s concept, we act as media strategist and coordinate the content creation or the usage of certain assets. Based on our dashboard, we report to the client and partners in order to optimize quickly. We also use Google Adwords to attract people who are at the end of the funnel to the website.

4. Combining all marketing efforts

NN works together with several parties and still wants to have a real time overview of all the marketing efforts and their respective performance versus targets. This is why we created a comprehensive dashboard to collect all this information. It gives us a full view on the campaigns, platforms, KPIs and shows us the real time performance of every effort. Each party involved has access to the numbers and receives frequent reporting with key insights and recommendations. The dashboard is the basis of the data-driven marketing approach.

5. UX: advising, optimizing and back to testing

UX advice is always based on data: Google Analytics, heatmapping and polling enable us to question the user’s experience. Then we can optimize and go back to testing again. Our main goal here is to shift the large amount of NN visitors to qualitative visitors. Those qualitative people stay longer on the platforms, consume more content and show more engagement like subscribing to the newsletter or making an appointment with a broker.

6. Reaching the right people

With the digital landscape defined and the dashing dashboard set up, our work is data-driven and follows a clear strategy. This fulfills NN’s marketing goal to be in a relationship with their (future) customer throughout their customer journey. By using the right touchpoints at the right time.

“We are very pleased with the cooperation. The Duke & Grace team is enthusiastic, creative, always flexible and results-oriented!”

Bart Veltjen

Marketing Manager NN