Adrian Flux: building brand authority for driverless car insurance

Understanding the importance of forward thinking within the financial services industry, the client was keen to be recognised as a brand that embraces and pushes forward in an age of fast paced technological changes.

Research and discussions between the two agencies identified autonomous vehicles as a topic rapidly growing in prominence, and likely to cause significant disruption to the insurance market. The large number of questions and issues raised by the public was evidence of a lack of education on the technology and its implications. Ambiguous information from other channels on driverless cars presented an opportunity for us to cut through the noise and position the brand as the leading authoritative voice on driverless car insurance.

If the client could create the first ever driverless cars insurance policy, before their competitors, we knew we could use this as the linchpin of the campaign and secure prominent coverage and recognition within the financial services industry.

Objectives

• Build brand awareness of Adrian Flux and develop their market leadership in this area.
• Ensure the brand is the authoritative voice on the topic of driverless cars and the ‘go-to’ company for future insurance requirements in a World continually disrupted by digital changes.
• Improve search rankings performance in the very competitive insurance market.

Strategy

To The End along with Further partnered together with Adrian Flux’s legal team to create a draft insurance policy. There were several complex considerations, particularly as this would introduce a product not yet available to consumers and break new ground in what we were promoting within the industry. At the time we started this project, a lot of the industry was still in denial about the advances of driverless technology, we were told “oh, there’s no need to worry, it’s 20 years away.”

Once on-site content for the insurance policy page had been created, the press releases were written, and answers to the questions most likely to be asked were compiled, with themes of insurance, technological, environmental and societal implications of driverless cars.

We almost came up against some difficulties when very shortly before our launch, Techworld published an article outlining issues with driverless car insurance. However, in our forward thinking approach, we’d already thought about these and we quickly pulled together an article to address their questions.

The distribution strategy was the next crucial step. The strategy would allow the client to spread the news industry-wide in addition to explaining to customers what it all meant. A media outreach list had been researched and collated, encompassing insurance, national, international and technology press.

The driverless hub continues to be added to, with more articles every month promoted to social audiences.

The platform we agreed upon to support the on-site content was a content hub, where interested parties could browse articles and videos to find out more about driverless cars from a dedicated, reliable source. This decision was based on multiple considerations.

Search and trends data, social and online news monitoring demonstrated what a talking point the driverless cars topic had become. The driverless car hub was launched at adrianflux.co.uk/driverless-cars, from this point several articles per month were added to build up credibility as an authority on the subject.

Results

The driverless car insurance campaign gained more than 200 pieces of branded coverage on sites with combined monthly traffic approaching 12 billion.

SEO Results

• From an SEO perspective, the campaign achieved 47 links on high authority sites within the first four weeks, with monthly traffic totalling 1.75 billion.
• Within only 8 weeks of launch, Adrian Flux ranked 5th for ‘driverless car insurance’ and 28th for ‘driverless cars’.
• The driverless car hub and the insurance policy landing page together attracted more than 27,000 pageviews in three months, representing 0.3% of all site traffic.
• The most popular page - the blog post promoting the fact that the policy was live - generated 7,834 pageviews alone.
• Rankings for relevant terms highlight that Adrian Flux is making its presence known - at least within organic search. By mid-October 2016, Adrian Flux ranked: - #3 for ‘driverless car insurance’ [260 global searches per month] - #33 for ‘driverless cars’ [33,100 global searches per month].
• Achieving improved rankings and traffic for terms directly related to the campaign are both desired incomes for this campaign. However, ‘Driverless Cars’ has given a significant boost to rankings and search share across the Adrian Flux insurance brand wherever there is med-high traffic and commercial intent.