Everybody loves pets! How Petplan leveraged content to avoid competing on price
CHS won the Financial Service category at The Drum Awards for the Digital Industries 2020 with its campaign for Petplan. Learn how they creatively turned our love for pets into a campaign to help keep them healthy, happy and well-insured.
The challenge
The way customers buy insurance is changing, and it's a big concern for the industry - decision making increasingly relies on price. This was challenge for Petplan: priding themselves in delivering the best care in the market, they provide high quality cover as well as having passionate and knowledgeable staff who can help you raise your pet. This is anything but ‘off-the-shelf insurance‘, which means Petplan can’t always compete on price.
Petplan identified the need to communicate the extra value that they can bring to pet owners - to help raise awareness of the brand, boost consideration of the product and of course, eventually, drive conversions.
The strategy
After holistically looking at the brand’s marketing activities, it became clear that there was a missed opportunity which could help:
● To drive conversions. the acquisition team have an always-on prospecting and retargeting strategy, across social and online display. This does a great job at converting customers who were already shopping for pet insurance, picking the ‘low hanging fruit’ through direct response creative.
● To produce content that converts. The brand team produces lots of engaging content, which helps raise awareness of the brand and build positive perception - but this content lacked a strategy for conversions.
We needed to connect the dots - activity was at two opposite ends of the spectrum, but the missing piece of the puzzle was something that sat somewhere in the middle. Reaching out to people who may not be in the market for pet insurance today but engaging them in the right way so that they consider Petplan when the time is right.
As we wanted to form an emotional connection with our audience, we needed to move away from listing functional features and develop a campaign which highlighted the emotional benefits of a Petplan policy.
After distilling the more emotive benefits, we extracted what we believed to be the most unique: for over 40 years, Petplan has only insured animals. And in that time, they’ve become experts in not just pet insurance, but also how to raise and look after pets at home.
The campaign
The answer? Petplan’s A-Z of Pet Parenting.
From puppy training, to tips on how to travel with your furry friend, and finding out if your cat sleeps too much. This is your go-to for all things pets and how to care for them. Everything you could ever need to know, all in one place. Your A to Z.
With this campaign wrapper, we were able to create a whole alphabetised glossary for the Petplan website - providing pet owners with everything they could possibly need to know about looking after their pet.
This campaign provided a way to house all the content which had already been created by the brand team. But now within the A-Z wrapper, the content has more purpose, a stronger creative presence and is now more easily found. Using individual letter content, a series of paid social ads were created. This caught the attention of our audience with specific topics, but also directed them to the glossary where they could browse and find out more.
They say you should never work with animals, but with 12 four-legged friends running around our set and 26 giant letters, our campaign idea was brought to life perfectly.
Collaborating with Mediacom, Petplan’s lead media agency, a strategy was put together testing different campaign objectives, audiences and creatives within Facebook and Instagram. Staying agile, we were then able to review performance and refresh the creative with new assets - so that we could always aim for the very best results.
The results
“No matter the brief, no matter the ask, I have never been disappointed with the result and I have always felt that our creative was in the very best hands. Everyone at CHS is extremely flexible and honest feedback about their work has always been welcomed, which meant that all creative produced was constantly top-notch. Over and above this, everyone is very team-spirited and I always felt like we were working towards the same end goal, albeit for 2 different companies. Over and above the fantastic creative delivery, their knowledge and understanding of the digital media world is simply outstanding.” - V. Budde, (formerly) senior digital marketing executive, Petplan
This project was a winner at The Drum Awards for the Digital Industries in 2020. To find out which competitions in The Drum Awards are currently open for entries, click here.