QBE Insurance
Building a B2B Marketing Engine from Thought Leadership
At a Glance
- 133 qualified leads generated over an 11-month campaign
- 47,570 new website visitors through paid and organic search
- 496,000 organic YouTube views across the QBE Heart Talks series
BACKGROUND
Background
QBE Singapore is a leading general insurer with a strong focus on helping businesses manage risk and build resilience. Beyond its insurance offerings, QBE has established itself as a thought leader through its annual SME Survey, one of Singapore's longest-running studies exploring the sentiments, challenges, and priorities of local SMEs.
Published annually, the survey provides valuable insights into topics such as business confidence, financial resilience, and growth, earning widespread recognition and media coverage across Singapore's business landscape.
THE CHALLENGE
The Challenge
While QBE's annual SME Survey consistently generated strong media coverage, its impact was largely limited to the news cycle. The opportunity was to transform a well-established thought leadership asset into a sustained marketing tool that could engage SMEs, support intermediaries, and generate measurable business outcomes.
This came at a critical time. Singapore's SMEs were facing increasing economic uncertainty, with rising operating costs, tighter cash flow, and slowing demand placing greater pressure on businesses. The survey itself revealed a significant protection gap:
These findings highlighted a disconnect between perceived business risks and insurance preparedness. Traditional insurance messaging alone would not be enough to capture attention or drive meaningful engagement.
At the same time, QBE wanted to demonstrate that the survey could deliver value beyond brand awareness. Rather than functioning solely as a public relations initiative, it needed to support broader marketing objectives by generating engagement, equipping brokers with valuable conversation starters, and creating qualified opportunities among SME decision-makers.
OUR APPROACH
Our Approach
1. Transforming Research into a Year-Round Content Engine
Rather than treating the SME Survey as a one-off publication, Brew transformed it into an integrated content platform that could continue generating value long after its initial launch.
The survey findings were repackaged into a range of digital assets, including articles, social media content, campaign visuals, videos, and landing pages, allowing the same research to be shared across multiple channels throughout the year.
This shifted the survey from a short-lived PR initiative into an always-on marketing asset that consistently engaged SME audiences while reinforcing QBE's expertise in understanding the challenges facing local businesses.
Key Insight: Research reports often enjoy only a brief period of visibility before being forgotten. Repurposing the findings into an ongoing content ecosystem extended the survey’s lifespan, increased the return on QBE's research investment, and created multiple opportunities to engage potential customers throughout their buying journey.
2. Crafting Audience-Specific Messaging
While the survey contained a single set of findings, the campaign needed to resonate with two very different audiences:
- SME owners and business decision-makers
- Insurance brokers and intermediaries
Rather than using identical messaging across all channels, Brew developed tailored content for each audience.
For SME owners, communications centred on the business risks highlighted in the survey, encouraging them to recognise gaps in their existing protection and prompting them to explore suitable insurance solutions.
For brokers and intermediaries, the same survey findings were reframed as practical sales tools, providing credible data, industry insights, and conversation starters to strengthen client discussions.
Key Insight: Different audiences engage with the same information for different reasons. By tailoring messaging to their specific needs and priorities, the campaign increased relevance, strengthened engagement, and enabled the survey to support both customer acquisition and intermediary relationships.
3. Building a Conversion-Focused Campaign Hub
To ensure campaign traffic translated into meaningful engagement, Brew redesigned QBE's SME product page and developed a dedicated campaign microsite, "The Insurer That Understands SMEs."
Instead of leading with product information, the page mirrored the survey's narrative, presenting the business challenges uncovered by the research before introducing relevant insurance solutions.
Supporting content, clear navigation, and strategically placed calls to action guided visitors naturally from awareness to enquiry.
Key Insight: Insurance is rarely an impulse purchase. Establishing relevance and educating visitors before introducing products builds greater trust, encourages longer engagement, and creates a stronger foundation for conversion.
4. Search & Performance Marketing
Brew implemented a multi-campaign search strategy to capture businesses actively researching insurance solutions.
Seven campaigns were developed across multiple audience segments, including:
- Brand searches
- Generic SME insurance searches
- Industry-specific campaigns for sectors such as F&B and healthcare
- Competitor search campaigns
Each campaign was supported by tailored ad copy aligned with the search intent of that audience, ensuring users were directed to the most relevant landing page and messaging.
Brew crafted targeted search ads aligned with different industries and business needs, delivering highly relevant messaging to SME decision-makers.
Ad performance was continuously monitored through:
- Keyword refinement
- Audience optimisation
- Bid management
- Budget reallocation towards higher-performing campaigns
Key Insight: Businesses searching for insurance are already demonstrating purchase intent. Meeting them with highly relevant messaging at that stage of the decision journey significantly improves both lead quality and campaign efficiency.
5. Humanising the Brand Through Video Content
To complement the research-led campaign, Brew conceptualised and produced the QBE Heart Talks video series, featuring QBE employees discussing the concerns, experiences, and challenges highlighted by the survey.
Rather than relying solely on corporate messaging, the series put real people at the forefront, making insurance advice feel more approachable, authentic, and relatable for SME audiences.
The videos were planned, scripted, filmed, edited, and distributed across QBE's digital channels as part of the wider campaign ecosystem.
Featuring real QBE employees, the Heart Talks series transformed survey insights into relatable conversations that built trust and engagement with SME audiences.
Key Insight: Human-centred content helps establish credibility, creates a stronger emotional connection, and encourages audiences to engage with the brand beyond traditional product marketing.
THE RESULTS
The Results
- Search advertising, or ads shown to people actively typing insurance-related searches into Google, became the campaign's strongest source of leads, reaching businesses already looking for insurance solutions.
- Across seven targeted search campaigns, Brew generated 133 qualified leads across the full 11-month campaign. This is a strong return for B2B insurance, where decision-making cycles are typically long and considered.
- Brand Search, or ads that appear when people specifically search for QBE by name, delivered close to 70 qualified enquiries and stood out as the campaign's most efficient source of leads.
- Campaigns tailored to specific industries also performed well, with Food & Beverage businesses and clinics converting at some of the highest rates in the campaign, showing that the industry-specific messaging resonated with these audiences.
- Search activity also surfaced QBE in searches for competitor insurers over 2,600 times, keeping the brand visible to businesses at the exact moment they were comparing providers.
- By focusing on people already searching for insurance, this approach generated genuine enquiries while keeping QBE visible alongside competitors at the exact moment businesses were making decisions.
- LinkedIn played a key role in building awareness among small business owners, business leaders, and insurance intermediaries (brokers and partners who sell QBE's products to their own clients).
- The intermediary infographic carousel drove 1,584 visits to the landing page from brokers and partners, making it one of the campaign's best-performing pieces of content and clear evidence that partners were actively using the material in client conversations.
- The QBE Heart Talks campaign's highest-performing creative, featuring QBE Business Development Manager Krystle Ang, was the standout piece of content, resonating with audiences and driving 496,000 organic YouTube views across the series.
By transforming the SME Survey into an integrated content ecosystem, Brew helped QBE extend the value of its thought leadership beyond media coverage, generating qualified leads, strengthening engagement with intermediaries, and reinforcing QBE's position as a trusted partner for Singapore's SME community.
Our Approach
When Collectius came to us with significant gaps in their SEO expertise and online visibility, we tailored a comprehensive approach that was designed to overhaul their digital presence and drive measurable improvements. Here's how we proceeded:
- SEO Audit: An on-page and off-page SEO audit was conducted to identify areas for improvement
- Google Search Console Installation: Google Search Console was installed on the Collectius website to monitor and track their analytics
- Digital Content Strategy: We produced a digital content strategy pack to help Collectius enhance their SEO goals
- Backlink Acquisition: Backlinks were purchased to improve Collectius' domain ranking Keyword Research: Extensive keyword research was performed to align content and SEO strategies with relevant search trends
Comprehensive SEO Audit
We initiated our process by conducting a detailed SEO audit for Collectius. This audit was crucial in pinpointing several critical areas where the company was underperforming.
Key issues we found included suboptimal keyword utilisation, missing meta descriptions, and poorly optimised content that wasn't fully aligned with target search queries.
Having identified areas for improvement, the Brew team worked with Collectius’ web development team to implement these fixes.
Following the initial SEO audit, we conducted a focused technical SEO audit for Collectius. A technical SEO audit is a thorough examination of a website’s technical infrastructure as it relates to its visibility and performance in search engines.
It evaluates several key elements, including site architecture, page speed, mobile-friendliness, indexing, crawlability, security, and use of technologies that may impact search engine access and efficiency.
This was a critical step to ensuring that the website’s infrastructure met modern search engine standards, which is pivotal for improving search rankings and user experience. Our audit revealed several key technical issues that needed immediate attention:
Slow Loading Speeds: We identified that the Collectius website had slower than optimal loading times. Slow speeds can significantly affect user experience and negatively impact search engine rankings. To address this, we optimised image sizes, minimised the use of blocking JavaScript, and implemented more efficient caching policies to enhance page load performance.
The Lack of a Sitemap: The absence of a sitemap was another critical gap. Sitemaps are essential as they help search engines more intelligently crawl the site and understand its structure. We created and submitted a comprehensive sitemap to Google, which facilitated better indexing of the website’s pages.
Mobile Optimization: Our audit also found that Collectius’ website was not optimised for mobile users. The Brew team provided detailed guidance to Collectius' web development team on best practices for mobile optimization going forward. This included advice on implementing accelerated mobile pages (AMP), optimising button sizes and touch targets, and ensuring text readability without requiring zoom.
Tracking & Monitoring of Collectius’ Web Performance
To better monitor and track the effectiveness of our strategies, we installed Google Search Console (GSC) on Collectius’ website. GSC allows us to gain valuable insights into the site's traffic, search performance, and any crawling errors, thereby enabling us to make data-driven decisions.
With data from GSC, we can identify which pages are performing well and which might require further optimization. This helps us refine SEO strategies and target specific issues with precision.
Digital Content Strategy
Recognizing the importance of content in SEO success, we crafted a comprehensive digital content strategy pack specifically tailored to Collectius' needs.
This strategy involved developing four customer personas and two end-user personas, representing the diverse segments of Collectius' audience. These personas helped us understand the distinct needs, behaviours, and preferences of different user types that interact with Collectius' services.
From this foundation, we were able to pinpoint the types of content and topics that would resonate most strongly with each persona. Leveraging these insights, we developed a series of SEO-optimised articles.
Each article was carefully written by our copywriter who made sure that keywords used were relevant with Collectius’ offerings and aligned with the interests of potential clients.
Taking this approach allowed us to attract more organic traffic to their site and significantly enhance visibility for these targeted search terms.
Backlink Acquisition
To strengthen Collectius’ domain authority and improve their search engine ranking, we strategically acquired high-quality backlinks. This effort was aimed at boosting their profile against competitors and increasing the trustworthiness of their site in the eyes of search engines.
Through our targeted backlink acquisition efforts, we gradually improved the organic traffic to Collectius' site.
As their domain authority increased, so did their visibility in search engine results, leading to more visitors naturally finding their way to the website without the need for paid advertising.
This steady increase in organic traffic not only enhanced their online presence but also contributed to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Outstanding SEO Results for Collectius
Our comprehensive SEO strategy delivered impressive results for Collectius, significantly enhancing their online visibility and search engine performance. Here are some of the key achievements:
Significant Traffic Growth
Over a period of six months, we achieved more than a 60% increase in organic traffic to Collectius' website. This surge in visitors was a direct result of our focused improvements in SEO practices and content strategies.
Expanded Keyword Reach
There was over a 70% increase in the number of organic keywords that Collectius ranks for on Google. This expansion in keyword coverage helped broaden their visibility and reach a wider audience interested in debt collection and financial services.
Top Rankings in Local Searches
Collectius' website achieved first-page rankings on Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for targeted searches in Singapore and Malaysia. Ranking on the first page for relevant searches significantly boosted their brand's visibility and accessibility in these key markets.
