Building traction with internet marketing for cloud based insurance software – first steps
Dec 2014By Triinu Murumäe Insurance Innovation
One of our major goals for the StartupBootcamp program and the main aim for Insly, is to sell our cloud based insurance broker and agent software without any territorial limitations to any broker where ever in the world they might be - there are at least 1 million broker companies globally. Internet marketing will definitely be the cornerstone of that. On 27.08.2014 we launched the 3.0 version of our software that is 100% cloud based meaning that clients can sign-up and start using it from their internet browsers. This marked a very important milestone in Insly’s history as our Estonian development team had been working on that upgrade for 6 months. Our sales team and I had been waiting for that moment for a long time. This really helps us focus 100% on sales and conversion as there is no obstacles and costs for creating new installation for each client separately. With quite a limited marketing budget we have by this day gained 190 sign-ups from 62 different countries and we are happy to share how we pulled this off with all of Insly’s followers.
In terms of marketing we identified 5 major channels that we wanted to experiment with in order to be able to make decision what works and what does not. These channels were:
Google AdWords, Re-Marketing, Google Display Network (GDN)
Social media marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)
Outbound phone calls
Email marketing
In addition to that we started working with long term and very important marketing pillars: SEO and Content Marketing.
What we found out?
Google AdWords. Works well and generates a lot of our traffic, we have tried at least 50 different key words but clearly there are only 4 – 5 that bring most of the traffic (we’ll keep these for now as our business secret:)). Unfortunately we have not yet started re-marketing or GDN activities, however, we hope to get up to speed with them very soon.
Capterra and Getapp. Clearly exceeded our expectations as being a new company you do not have a good ranking in google organic search yet and these software aggregators make it much easier for clients to find you.
LinkedIn and Facebook. Do not work at all when selling enterprise SaaS product, at least for us. The click rate of advertising was close zero. Sure, we use social media for content marketing but in terms of generating leads with the help of marketing they proved to be useless for us. It is also possible we just did not figure out how to make the most out of these platforms so if anybody has ideas how to help us on that, these are most welcome.
Outbound phone calls and email marketing. We will leave this for our next blog post as this is still a work in progress because we do not have clear results from these channels yet.
Playing with different landing pages. Almost all marketing mentors that we have had, suggested to create several landing pages with different messages and test what works best. There are clear principles of lean start-up – do not assume anything and the internet gives you all the tools that are needed to test it. So just create hypotheses and test them with A/B testing. So we did. We created different landing pages with 8 different messages and the result was that unsurprisingly our initial plain vanilla simple message worked better than all the other messages we created for testing purposes. Good to know! At least the next time this question is asked we have an answer.
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