CMO Angela Greenwood explains why Youi has recruited GrowthOS to make creative work harder in the fight for customer attention.
Youi has made major inroads into Australia’s insurance category since the challenger brand launched and now. But the real challenge is in making marketing investments work harder than larger, free-spending rivals. CMO Angela Greenwood says the mid-funnel is a key focus – and now seeks sharper data on creative and media performance to drive growth, plan future investment and outpoint rivals.
Putting Youi at the top of the shopping list
Youi has notched major growth since launching in Australia in 2007, but the insurance brand still considers itself a challenger in a tough category where the battle for customer attention is fierce. In 2023, CMO Angela Greenwood is looking harder at the middle of the funnel and creative adstock in an effort to gain an edge over rivals. “We’re in a highly competitive industry”, she points out “and for us, the challenge is always to scale profitably.”
Youi has always understood the need to be top of mind for customers making a decision in a short window of time: Customers buy or renew for a year, but might only be in market for a matter of hours, even minutes, when it comes to making that purchase.
“It can be quite tight,” says Greenwood. “Our challenge … is to be on the shopping list when people are going to get those quotes. So that is obviously a brand challenge and it’s one that we absolutely recognise.”
The challengers’ challenge is that established brands have a natural advantage – they have deeper pockets. Hence Youi investing in a marketing funnel designed to squeeze the most out of its budget across all stages.
Finding the edge in the middle
“For us it’s about how we make sure we maintain brand familiarity and consideration while also keeping our performance engine tightly calibrated,” says Greenwood.
For 2023, she sees competitive advantage in the middle of the funnel, the turf between brand (designed to drive longer term growth) and performance (designed to drive short-term sales).
“Given we want to grow brand consideration and really educate Australia about what we stand for, our opportunity is to get more presence in the mid-funnel on channels such as online video and social that help us unpack our value proposition and to connect our historic focus on mass channels and performance to something that builds our story a little bit more.”
Using GrowthOS marketing mix modelling to make creative work harder
Mid-funnel channels, with longer formats and more focused shoppers, are typically where creative can either shine or flop. The boost provided by good creative can be a significant factor in media performance.
Greenwood agrees: “I believe that [regular creative assessment] is absolutely critical. It’s something that actually a lot of historical approaches to market mix modeling have discounted… We can be so obsessed about the channel optimisation yet forget about the biggest X factor in all of this, which is the message and the creative that you’re putting into it.”
Youi now aims to better assess how and where creative is moving the needle. “I think that that will unlock a lot of optimisation opportunities, not just in our media buy, but in our creative approach,” says Greenwood.
Youi has recently signed with market mix modeling platform, Mutinex, to help unpack some of the trickier questions around creative performance across various channels.
“The true test of creativity is basically the rate of impact and also how memorable that impact is,” says Mutinex Co-Founder and CEO, Henry Innis.
“Because we have a time varying model in Mutinex GrowthOS where our ad stocks are actually able to vary over time, you can look at one campaign versus another and compare performance. For example, you can see that one campaign lasted for four weeks and four weeks later it still had some effect on the consumer, versus another campaign which had an impact for 16 weeks. Clearly the second one was far more effective and had a far higher return because the creative was good.”
The marketing and media teams can then get a better understanding of both the media and the message most likely to drive results.
The importance of dynamic marketing mix modelling
Youi’s Greenwood will use the platform to look backwards as well as make predictions on different investment scenarios “to make sure we are on that shopping list” when customers are in-market, and to better gauge potential return on marketing investment.
“Forward thinking and scenario planning is critical when you are trying to defend budgets or you are trying to demonstrate and model future investment,” she says.
“The advantage I see from something like Mutinex GrowthOS is that ability to not just look backwards [to determine what has worked and what hasn’t], but also to look forward and say, ‘okay, what could we do next and how can we predict what further impact we can have?’” Plus ultimately, she says, “to make sure that whatever we’re investing in is driving a profitable outcome”.
