From digitally invisible to impossible to ignore °

The Brief

HMCA is an established UK health insurer with a very particular audience: members of professional membership organisations. Not the general public. Not “people interested in health insurance”. A specific, niche group you can’t reach with a broad media buy.

The commercial target was serious: 20,000 leads. The starting position wasn’t. Lead generation lived in print and direct mail, and online the brand barely existed at the moment it mattered most, the point where someone weighs up who to trust with their health cover.

Then the constraint that shapes this whole story: Google Ads wasn’t an option. No paid search. No bidding on high-intent keywords. The channel most insurers lean on hardest, gone before we’d started.

The Thinking

When you can’t buy intent, you have to build it.

That meant flipping the usual order of operations. Instead of capturing demand at the point of search, we set out to create preference before the search ever happened, so that when this audience did go looking, they went looking for HMCA by name.

Brand and performance as one system, not two budgets. It’s how we work on every account. HMCA is just the purest proof of it, because the “easy” performance channel was never there to hide behind.

What We Did

• LinkedIn. The one platform where you can target professional audiences with real precision. We built hyper-focused campaigns around the membership market and turned LinkedIn into HMCA’s primary acquisition funnel. Not a supporting act: at scale it delivered 2,000 enquiries a month, the biggest lead source in the business.
• SEO and Digital PR. The slow burn. We built domain authority where it mattered, so organic visibility would still be compounding long after any single campaign ended. Coverage and links that earn trust with people and with search engines.
• YouTube. Received wisdom says older audiences aren’t on YouTube. Received wisdom is wrong; they over-index there. We followed the data to where HMCA’s audience actually spends time, not where assumptions put them.
• Connected TV via Sky. Nobody else in this category was on TV. That’s exactly why we went there. Addressable TV let HMCA show up with the scale and credibility of a broadcast brand, targeted tightly enough to make sense for a niche insurer. We tested with £16,000 in month one.

The Results

That £16,000 CTV test returned £204,000 in month one. A 12.75× return, from the channel most performance agencies would never have recommended to a client this niche.

And the numbers tell a bigger story than any one channel. Average order value rose 30%, because people who already trust a brand don’t just buy, they buy better. Branded search climbed 46%, which is the whole strategy working out loud: demand we created showing up as searches we never had to pay for.

That last number matters more every year. Branded search is exactly the signal AI-powered search leans on when it decides which brands to surface and cite. Build the brand and you’re not just winning today’s enquiry, you’re teaching every engine that matters who the answer is.

The Takeaway

Brand building isn’t the fluffy stuff you get round to once performance is maxed out. Run properly, it is performance: measurable, attributable and compounding. HMCA couldn’t touch Google Ads, and still built its biggest ever lead engine.

If a channel’s off the table, the growth doesn’t have to be.