119% Policy Adoption Surge for Financial Firm

A key aspect of any marketing agency’s mission is to show clients how marketing drives revenue. For one of Goodway’s agency partners and their client, this meant building a data-driven approach to demonstrate brand and demand strategies while executing a successful brand lift campaign.

The client, a regional financial services firm who specializes in life insurance, began advertising in late 2023. Their goals were to increase life insurance applications, increase their number of policies, and measurably engage their target audience in each market.

One challenge is that the firm has a regional focus and an in-person sales model. So, our agency partner wanted a localized digital strategy with consistent national messaging. Additionally, our agency partner wanted to illustrate a realistic brand-building timeline given the client’s competitive regional market.

Our agency partner managed traditional and direct response marketing for this initiative, and tagged Goodway to run CTV awareness campaigns. As the client was new to digital advertising, Goodway sought to understand the firm’s share of voice (SOV), share of market (SOM), and target audiences' media consumption to inform a tangible pace and budget to hit the client’s goals.

Using Goodway's Brand Compass tool, we analyzed 2023 & 2024 campaign data to measure the firm's SOV and SOM against national and regional competitors. We also created forecasting models to project how different ad spend levels would impact SOV and SOM. Finally, we pulled CTV consumption trends alongside our agency partner’s data to see where the firm’s target audience engaged most.

With these insights as our guide, we ran CTV on the following publishers: Hulu, Disney+, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube TV, and others. Each platform had a different budget allocation based on the audience’s consumption analysis. We also ran CTV during tentpole events like the Olympics and the Oscars toward our primary viewing audience.

Results included a 26% YoY increase in life insurance applications (over 600 additional applications) from the firm’s target audience. The firm’s policy numbers also increased in six of their eight active markets ranging from 14% policy adoption to 119%, beating the forecast models.

The firm has also seen a 62% increase in website sessions across all their active markets, correlated with which markets had the most media spend. Additionally, results of a Lucid Brand Study showed statistically significant brand lift within the firm’s target demographic, including a 6% increase in awareness, a 3% increase in ad recall, and a 4% increase in recommendation.

Our results show the importance of properly executed ad frequency to build awareness. The Lucid study showed a 10% increase in awareness when a potential customer was exposed to an ad 10+ times. Goodway’s strategic buying approach managed reach and frequency at the user level to avoid wasted impressions, ensuring that frequency was effective but not overbearing for the target audience.