There’s something special about a company that continues to thrive after four generations and 100 years.
Wells Insurance Agency has a long-standing reputation built by helping their customers the right way—the Wells way.
Not all insurance companies are created equal, and there aren’t many who offer the same level of experience and expertise as the team at Wells Insurance. With Wells, you are more than protected—you are Wells protected! And with a 97% retention rate from their clients, their expertise and reputation genuinely speak for themselves.
THE CHALLENGE
However, like every smart company, they knew they needed a solid marketing plan to build this robust brand identity and showcase it to the public. Sage Island diligently worked to create a strategic plan to carry that out for them, including the following comprehensive branding and design elements.
THE SOLUTION
Centennial logo lockups and branding.
To celebrate 100 years of business excellence as a family-owned and operated independent insurance agency, we partnered with Wells Insurance to develop and guide its 2020 Centennial Marketing Campaign. Our goal was to communicate its depth of industry relationships, experience, and insights with its potential and existing customer base. Leaning upon its industry experience, multi-carrier accessibility, and company ethos, “The Wells Way,” we helped redefine its approach to customer retention by highlighting its accomplishments and setting a clear focus on its leading business aspects: experience, price, and connections.
The Wells brand guide outlined how to correctly utilize its newly designed Centennial logo lockup, typography, colors, iconography, and additional design elements within the brand identity system. The guide also featured design applications for both in-house and external marketing communications across print and digital mediums.
Brand guidelines.
We worked with Wells to build its identity system and brand guidelines for the anniversary year and beyond, to establish a cohesive “customer-centric” aesthetic and voice. We wanted to create an identity that personified the agency, its culture, its commitment to fostering trusted relationships, and the ability to give back to its community.
Within the brand guide, we created a series of service-oriented human personas featuring a collection of personality traits, attitudes, and values that reflected Wells’ key audience. In addition, we crafted brand phraseology that would play a central role in communicating the personality and tone of the Wells brand across all touchpoints of the campaign.
Billboards, signage, & retractable banners.
Expanding upon the visual identity we created, we turned to more traditional marketing methods to support the Wells brand. We implemented a localized print campaign that included traditional marketing materials such as digital billboards, print adverts, direct mail pieces, and on-and-off-site retractable banners that focused on driving new traffic to wellsins.com.
To capture the brand experience, we were also asked to create on-site signage for Wells’ headquarters located in the business district of historic downtown Wilmington, NC. Utilizing our visual identity system, we created custom die-cut display case window decals and backdrops along with simplified messaging, thanking the community for its business and allowing Wells to provide “peace of mind” to its loyal customers for the past century.
Exciting and purposeful videography.
With everything we implemented into the new marketing package for Wells, we still knew we needed a better way to visually express their story and capture the brand’s presence. Wells Insurance needed quality and expertly edited video highlighting its local roots while showcasing its global reach and a broad range of services.
Our Sage Island videography took to task and created many promotional videos that met all their needs that can easily be shared for marketing purposes across many platforms. To give their website and social media a boost in traffic, we created videos that showcased:
- Services provided – such a marine and personal insurance.
- Local community roots.
- FAQ segments.
- Expert team.
A digital marketing strategy.
Working in tandem with our traditional marketing efforts, Wells also tapped Sage Island to further strategize and develop additional digital content. To drive engagement and develop new audience leads and opportunities, we created and launched a monthly content strategy, pairing social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and a Google AdWords campaign to target Wells’ niche insurance sectors including personal, commercial, marine, and group health insurance.
A fresh website design & customized landing page.
Looking to better its online presence while generating new leads through the marketing campaign, we also worked with Wells on their existing website to ensure it reflected their updated branding. We updated the site, CMS, and third-party integrated tools to improve the overall client experience. Following an in-depth site audit, we began by collaborating with Wells to reconstruct its existing sitemap, creating a new navigational structure focused on its insurance products, services, client tools, and claims processes.
We then turned our attention to the Wells’ home page. After identifying missing touchpoints such as the inability to easily access insurance services, and no option to generate a quick quote, we created clear calls-to-action, along with a global quick quote tool that would provide customers with the ability to start a quote from anywhere on the site instantly.
Upon evaluating Wells’ Insurance service landing pages, we knew we needed to streamline the current visual design while providing updated on-page optimization to each sector’s content—which is an industry that’s often stunted by length and legalese—lacked clarity.
Ultimately, we developed a customizable page template that utilizes a repeatable layout to introduce new design standards, mixing visually pleasing images with new typography styles and clear calls-to-action to provide visual hierarchy to each page’s content. Standardizing the landing page designs contributed to improving their SEO and helped create a visual consistency that’s carried across the site.
THE RESULT
Wells continues to honor its commitment to enriching the client experience with easy-to-navigate actions, comprehensive verbiage, and cutting-edge technology with these site updates.
Sage Island’s team is proud to have had a hand in the continued success of a locally based business by switching up marketing strategies to fit the needs of current and potential clients.
As Wells Insurance keeps providing customers with the best products and services on the insurance market, we’ll continue to monitor the progress of our efforts. So far, the outlook is positive, and their customer base keeps growing!
