Knowing their target audience lets benefits/insurance broker step away from cliched industry graphic standard
Website graphics for insurance and benefits brokers are nearly always the same – happy, healthy faces, multicultural and without any real appeal to anyone.
Think about it for a second … does anyone look at generic stock photos of generic families and feel warm and fuzzy because they look just like us? Of course not. People aren’t generic.Premier Benefits isn’t your generic benefits company though. Admittedly, this was a redesign of a previous site I’d done for them, which featured the same type of generic images I’m talking about. So when a redesign became in order to take advantage of new mobile response technology, the client wanted to try something different.
This is California remember, and Premier Benefits is unique in their personal approach to client relations. They tend to work with clients with whom they have an affinity. As a result, they know their target audience far more intimately than market research, or an art director sitting in the midwest ever could.
California is full of natural wonder, something its residents take advantage of. An active lifestyle leads to better health – better health leads to an active lifestyle. When you’re more active you tend to get out into nature more. So why not feature the places that people in the area would likely be familiar with?
Obviously it’s not the first time the insurance industry has turned to nature – “get a piece of the rock” comes to mind. But the end result has been positive. The client is happy, the client’s clients like the change, and what could have been a dry and somewhat dull site stands apart their competition.
Along with a more robust mobile experience, we took into consideration that many of Premier Benefit’s clients use iPads to view the site. Even their representatives use them for presentations. With tablets it’s more convenient for the viewer to swipe down than continually click through to new pages.
So there are fewer pages to the site, deeper content on several of the pages. Rather than stick to simple bullet points, we went with icons to illustrate each point. Another factor to keep in mind is people on tablets tend to skim more and read less. Icons help to tell the story at a glance.
In the end we did with the site what Premier Benefits does with its clients, look at the person they’re trying to help, and design something with them in mind, rather than follow generic industry standards.
View the site at www.premierbenefits.com
