Insurance, as a category, has gained prominence over the last few years, especially post Covid. As per consumer research, 90 per cent-plus consumers today are aware of health insurance and over 75 per cent believe insurance is crucial but the penetration continues to be sub 10 per cent as lack of relevance, urgency, and trust continue to be the biggest barriers, stated Nimish Agrawal, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Niva Bupa Health Insurance.
Nimish Agrawal engaged in a candid conversation with e4m about various facets of the insurance industry, the challenges and how Niva Bupa, as a brand, is combating those hurdles via its marketing efforts.
Marketing strategies transforming perception of insurance
To deal with this issue, Niva Bupa understood the root cause that health Insurance for the longest time has been sold on fear and an element of uncertainty that a medical emergency can strike anytime and so one should be protected with health insurance. “At Niva Bupa, instead of riding on fear and uncertainty as triggers to talk about health insurance, we urge our customers to live their lives to the fullest and leave all their worries related to planned or unplanned medical expenses on Niva Bupa, and hence our brand philosophy isZindagi Ko Claim Kar Le. Through our various campaigns, we drive home the message that health insurance is for ‘Freedom’ and not ‘Constraints’.
Niva Bupa tapped into the power of consumer testimonials to build trust, promoted travel insurance riding on legendary Bollywood films, and made health insurance a category for all seasons and reasons.
“Insurance is a trust-based industry and to reinforce consumer belief in the brand, we leveraged customers as brand spokespersons and rolled out a campaign called ‘Smile Ko Claim kar le’which is a series of customer testimonials in multiple formats like videos, statics, carousels. The campaign is the largest advocacy program in the industry with over 75 million plus consumer views at 46 per cent plus view-through rate,” Agrawal said.
Moreover, consumers are still grappling to understand category details, he said. There is therefore a need for category education. The travel category is still commoditised as no player commands a perceptual difference. The opportunity at hand for Niva was to transform the afterthought approach to travel insurance by establishing category relevance and educating the consumer.
Niva Bupa’s recipe for success was to play like a category leader; own the mainstream category code of ‘Mitigating travel mishaps’ and ride on a large cultural fuel. Nothing fuels culture in India, like Bollywood and Cricket, travel and tourism are no exception, as Bollywood has deeply influenced travellers for decades. “We created a campaign called‘Har Trip Superhit’using Bollywood and entertainment as a backdrop to highlight the need and benefits of Travel Insurance. The ongoing campaign has generated three million views with 51 percent view-through rate,” added Agrawal.
Lastly, to drive consideration for the health insurance category not just in sickness and anxiety but in everyday joy and celebrations of people, Niva Bupa has unveiled many occasion and product-based films over the last 12 months which are set up in the Gyms, office canteens, salons and leveraged festivals of India like Diwali and Raksha Bandhan.
The Niva Bupa CMO revealed, “Our Diwali campaign on gifting Health Insurance to parents around Diwali saw VTR of 98 percent and 10 Million plus views within 10 days of the campaign going live. The Rakhi campaign was another heart-warming campaign that was launched which honours the invaluable contribution of nurses or ‘sisters’ in the journey of a patient’s recovery during hospitalisation. The emotional storytelling in the campaign resonated well with the intended audience as it received 8.2 million viewership, 40 million impressions, and 165k likes.”
Today, on the back of these campaigns Niva Bupa has become the second most searched brand in the category (up from the fifth position 15 months back). Also, Niva Bupa is the strongest brand in the category in terms of unaided, aided recall as well as consideration as per the Nielsen Brand Health Track.
Effective digital marketing strategies
Reaching this level of audience also requires effective digital marketing strategies. Starting with comprehensive online reputation management, the company deployed an ORM solution along with social listening and that helped them actively manage consumer outreach in under 12 minutes and faster closure of the consumer grievance.
“This helped us move the perception of Niva Bupa significantly, we have witnessed 3X growth in positive mentions and 45 percent movement in net sentiment score,” Agrawal highlighted.
He further underlined how SEO plays an important part too. “Consumer search on Health Insurance has gone up by 43 percent over the last two years. We have been focussing on driving the discoverability of NBHI in these searches by focussing on content and SEO optimization both onsite and offsite. Our organic traffic on Niva Bupa today is 2X of Max Bupa domain which was a more established and older domain.”
Given the media landscape today, with an increasing cord shaver in the country and traditional TV watch time declining at a rapid pace, Niva Bupa has found a good impact with the campaigns and experiments that we have done on the connected TV ecosystem as well.
Trends to look out for in 2024
The key trends to watch out for in 2024 pertaining to health insurance specifically include product and service edge, investment in upping the digital journey and experimenting with Gen AI and LLM.
Growing demand for hyper-personalised products and services tailored to individual needs and risk profiles will be in focus, fuelled by consumer demand and the need for differentiation, Agrawal underlined.
He stressed upon the fact that insurance companies will continue to strengthen their digital game right from the look and feel of the website, consumer journeys, differentiated and simple products, and fulfillment. Customer experience on digital assets and performance marketing to drive upper funnel traffic will be the key areas of deployment.
While there has been interest in Gen AI over the last one year, Agrawal expects the maturing of a few use cases around chatbots and customer service that will ease consumer anxiety.
