Staysure turns audience strategy on its head with LinkedIn Profile targeting

UK-based insurance provider Staysure specialises in travel insurance for the over-50s market. Looking for inspiration to differentiate their brand in a market dominated by insurance aggregators, Staysure came to Microsoft Advertising for help.

Turning everything on its head

“A big part of what we are doing is turning everything on its head and looking at audiences with a fresh perspective,” commented James Robinson, Staysure’s Head of Digital Marketing. ‘Turning everything on its head’ meant testing previously held assumptions about who their actual customers are. “When you think of our business, the assumption is that LinkedIn wouldn’t be a good fit for us, as it over-indexes on working professionals and most of our customers are retirees,” said Robinson. “But when we looked at where the opportunities really existed, we started to see our ads resonating with audiences we didn’t think would be our target customers.”
 
Staysure decided to test LinkedIn Profile targeting as an additional source of audience targeting to uncover new insights into their customer base.
 
With the help of their agency Merkle and Microsoft Advertising, Staysure targeted a broad base of 150 industries initially. After testing and learning which industries were high performers, they optimised to the 20 best performing industries and set aggressive bid modifiers up to +300% to gain additional clicks.

The power of LinkedIn Profile targeting

The targeting strategy was a success. LinkedIn Profile targeted campaigns had a 94% higher click-through rate and 111% higher conversion rate than standard text ads. “I was shocked by how strong the performance was of LinkedIn Profile targeting,” said Georgina Hurst, Senior Paid Search Manager at Merkle. “For the conversion rate to be significantly higher than our previous website visitors was very surprising.” As a result of implementing LinkedIn targeting, Staysure was able to increase their overall conversions by 5% between August and December 2019.
 
After the success Staysure saw with Microsoft Advertising and LinkedIn targeting, there are now plans to replicate this strategy across their other brands. “We didn’t even know that these people existed as potential customers for our products,” said Robinson. “And when some of these audiences did perform well, it was a puzzle. But that’s the beauty of this approach. We’re testing the boundaries to see how far we can push this strategy to maximise our reach and potential.” 
 
View the infographic to discover how Staysure increased its conversions with Microsoft Advertising, or head to the website to read the full case study.