Interview: We will use short-video formats for re-targeting: Anika Agarwal, Max Bupa Health Insurance

Anika Agarwal, Director & Head-Marketing, Digital, and Direct Sales, Max Bupa Health Insurance shares interesting thoughts and insights on marketing in the BFSI sector, digital marketing trends, and more.

Max Bupa Health Insurance launched its latest campaign #SabkiSister during the festival of Raksha Bandhan, which touched the emotive chord through storytelling. Further, the brand explores various digital marketing techniques to break the serious image of BFSI.

In an exclusive tête-à-tête with Social Samosa, Anika Agarwal, Max Bupa sheds light on the challenges and strengths of BFSI marketing in the social media space, their latest campaign, and more.

Excerpts

Max Bupa Health Insurance launched #SabkiSister very recently. What was the insight behind the campaign?

Our
latest campaign #SabkiSister celebrates the festival of Raksha Bandhan with a
twist. We are looking at celebrating the unsung Heroes of healthcare which is
our nurses, who look after all our patients in the time of need.

As a health insurance company, we closely work with all the healthcare providers in the country and sometimes we miss the considerations of these healthcare heroes, on an everyday basis. The idea was to celebrate them and also to celebrate the festival of Raksha Bandhan in the context of the category which is healthcare.

What are your thoughts on storytelling in BFSI?

Whenever we talk about storytelling on digital or any format, it is about bringing the brand alive to the customers.

If you look at health insurance, as a category, yes, we pay claims to the customers but there’s also the aspect of helping them in their worse times when they need a partner. We use digital storytelling to bring this emotion to life to the customers.

Even for the #SabkiSister campaign, we did the campaign in Hindi with the subtitles. Apart from this, we also do some interesting on-ground activations for the nurses.

Also read: Interview: “We’re dealing with a market where many listeners are on pirated music” Amarjit Singh Batra, Spotify India

Do you leverage on vernacular language on social media channels? What are the benefits of using vernacular for regional markets?

Campaigns that are available in local vernacular language have an added advantage to brands.

What you can actually do, when you do these vernaculars, is a tie-up with the local content houses or publications and create meaningful campaigns.

That’s an area which we explore for the future as well.

What is your take on short-format ads? With the launch of Facebook Thumbstoppers, do you think 10—seconder ads are an effective way to deliver the brand message?

Usually, in the case of emotive storytelling, you will need long-format ads, which is why you will see us doing long format ads followed by the short ones.

These short-format videos serve as good reminder mediums to your main message and also when you are talking about performance marketing and you need to deliver short messages in terms of product benefits and features, they work well but when we talk about emotive storytelling, the long format still works a little better.

We will use the newer formats in terms of re-targeting, performance marketing and usage with the existing customers.

3 digital trends you plan to leverage

One big trend, we are trying to leverage is personalization. If you look at a large amount of information, there exists a huge opportunity for personalized services and products and even marketing in terms of messages. So, hyper-personalization is a big trend, we plan to leverage in the next 12-18 months

The second is that there is a lot of usage of content marketing which includes a video wherein a category like ours, there’s a large bit of education that is required and also help us in terms of our performance spends.

The third from customer service effectiveness point of view, use of AI for real-time help to our customers for the 6-12 months.

How do you go about full-funnel marketing for the brand? Please shed some light on this?

Essentially, we build top of the funnel through offline and online and as we move at the bottom of the funnel, we use a lot of re-targeting and programmatic buying with lookalike at key segments of the customers. We also invest a lot in search because these are the guys actively looking for us and are intended customers.

40% of our investments in the top of the funnel and rest of 60% on the intenders and affiliates.

3 tips you would like to share with the marketers & agencies

• Balance short-term and long-term objective of the brand and align it with trends.
• With digital, spends need to have a clear ROI- driven focus. So, you don’t invest a lot in terms of attribution because if you don’t have this, chances are that you are spending on the wrong channel. Not just the last click attribution but from the first click to the last one, multi-layer attribution is something the brands should invest in.
• Third would be around personalization and content. There’s a lot of scopes there. So, I think the brands should start to build capabilities and invest in data and data-mining capabilities