How Lo(cal) Can You Go In Target Marketing?

Reaching your target audience is key to a successful marketing campaign. So what do you do when your target audience consists of parents and students at 10 Southeastern colleges?

In a digital lead-generation campaign, the Gallagher Global Brokerage Marketing team was able to successfully promote college student personal property coverage to parents (primary audience) and students (secondary). Over a two-month period, this marketing program generated more than 11x ROI for the company’s Southeast region.

Geofencing, a location-based marketing tool, is what allowed Gallagher to reach a micro-target audience with this short time period.

Geofencing uses global positioning (GPS) or radio frequency identification (RFID) to define a virtual border. Whenever someone crosses into a geofenced area, that triggers a pre-programmed message to their mobile device. Gallagher had previously used geofencing for event marketing and conference campaigns.

The Gallagher marketing team developed social media ads for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, which reached parents and students at the 10 targeted schools. Digital programmatic banner ads within the geofenced markets ran during key dates, such as move-in day and parents weekend. A :15 second video spot was developed for social and programmatic advertising.

With cell phones, tablets and laptops, today’s college students own expensive technology that didn’t exist when their parents went to school. Campaign content highlighted that student personal liability insurance covered damage losses — for example, a beverage spilling on a laptop or a dropped phone  — which aren’t typically aren’t recoverable under a homeowner’s policy. The campaign also emphasized that the policy was affordable and offered lower deductibles than most homeowner’s coverage.

Gallagher’s strategy resulted in 938,000 impressions, a 2.89% click-through rate and an impressive 6.55% conversion rate. With all roads leading to Gallagher’s landing page, www.collegestudentinsurance.com, more than 1,700 transactions were completed online. Based on this success, the company expanded this campaign to 20 schools across the country for the “Back to School” push beginning in August 2019. For the same date range, they have received 20% more transactions per day, year over year.

Gallagher’s innovative campaign won the Best of Show for the Digital/Marketing Campaign category and the SAMMY Award at IMCA’s 2019 conference.