360° Guide to Marketing Strategy of Canada Life – with company overview

Updated on: Oct 21, 2022
Marketing strategy of Canada Life - featured image

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My name is Aditya Shastri and I have written this case study with the help of my students from IIDE's online digital marketing courses in India.

Practical assignments, case studies & simulations from Harvard Business Review helped the students from this course present this analysis.

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In the previous article, we learnt about the marketing strategy of Nippon Life Insurance. In this case study, we will deep dive into the marketing strategy of Canada Life – a renowned life insurance company with $396 billion in assets, an insight into the marketing strategy of this stable life insurance company is worth it if you consider marketing an integral part of your business.

In reality, marketing is one of the cores of a business if not the core. Having a good product or service is good but if you don’t put the word out about your business to your potential customers, how will they know and consider patronizing you?

Having a valuable business is good but not putting up a strategy to get people aware, interested, and desire then patronize, you will make little to no sales. We all know that your business needs to make sales to survive and even more sales to thrive. 

All levels of businesses need a marketing strategy and this varies from business to business depending on the business model, business current revenue, current market trend, and some other factors.

Notwithstanding, there are general principles of marketing that apply to all businesses. This is why you should consider researching the marketing strategies of thriving businesses like Canada Life and then gain insight into fixing your business’s marketing strategy puzzle pieces.

We have a Free Masterclass to get you started on digital marketing for your business. If you think of yourself as a business owner, then you should consider digital marketing an integral part of your business success. 

This blog will focus on the digital marketing strategy of Canada Life.

 

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About Canada Life –

Marketing strategy of Canada life - logo

Source – CEIRP

Canada Life is Canada’s first domestic life insurance company and was founded in 1847.  Canada Life provides insurance and wealth management products and services in Canada, the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man and Germany, and Ireland through Irish Life.

For individuals, families, and company owners in Canada, Canada Life offers investments, retirement income, annuities, life insurance, disability insurance, critical illness insurance, and job loss insurance. Great-West Life distributes the Group Payout Products offered by Canada Life.

Leading banking institutions and other lending organizations choose Canada Life as a top provider of creditor insurance.

Canada Life and Irish Life offer a wide selection of protection and wealth management solutions to people and their families in Europe.

For individuals, families, and company owners in Canada, Canada Life offers investments, retirement income, annuities, life insurance, disability insurance, critical illness insurance, and job loss insurance. Great-West Life distributes the Group Payout Products offered by Canada Life.

For life insurers in the US and other markets, Canada Life is a market leader in providing classic mortality, structured, and longevity reinsurance solutions.

Great-West Life, London Life, and Canada Life, as well as their controlling companies, London Insurance Group Inc. and Canada Life Financial Corporation, merged on January 1, 2020, to form the Canada Life Assurance Company.

Leading banking institutions and other lending organizations choose Canada Life as a top provider of creditor insurance.

Canada Life and Irish Life offer a wide selection of protection and wealth management solutions to people and their families in Europe.

Today, Canada Life has more than 13 million customer bases across Canada. Also, Canada Life is a member of the Power Financial Corporation group of companies.

Quick Stats on Canada Life

CEO Paul A. Mahon
CMO Jeff Marshall
Area Served Canada, The United States, The United Kingdom, The Isle of Man and Germany. And in Ireland through Irish Life.
Industry Insurance and financial services
Revenue $ 3,171 million
Vision Fulfil the insurance, retirement, and investment needs of all Canadians.
Tagline For life as you know it

 

Marketing Strategy of Canada Life –

Now, let’s dive straight into the marketing strategy of this great brand and see how its marketing efforts are making them thrive.

Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning

Canada life serves –

  • Retirement, 
  • Investment, and 
  • Protection market.

Rather than targeting a certain group of financial advisers as they once did, they are now gradually expanding the scope of their footprint and offers.

Financial advisors, corporate advisers, and employee benefits consultants market a variety of wealth management-related products, such as onshore bonds and retirement income solutions. They also take part in the market for bulk annuities.

They specialize in offering companies group life insurance policies that are marketed to corporate advisors and employee benefits consultants.

Canada Life International markets offshore bond and estate planning solutions to financial advisers as a part of the larger Canada Life business. Five risk-rated multi-asset portfolios were introduced by Canada Life Investments in November 2013 for the UK retail market.

They took over as the exclusive brand name for Retirement Advantage’s full product line on October 3, 2018. They can develop new products and strengthen their retirement, wealth management, and protection markets thanks to the integration of Retirement Advantage with Canada Life.

Marketing Campaigns

Marketing strategy of canada life - marketing campaign

With its first-ever mass media campaign, Canada Life launched its new, unified brand throughout the nation. By positioning itself as a provider for all of Canadians’ needs, it avoids the feast-or-famine strategy that frequently governs financial services advertising.

As part of a brand consolidation that combined Great West Life and London Life under the Canada Life master brand, the new brand tagline, “For Life As You Know It,” emphasized the “Life” portion of the company name.

The creative, which employs a stylized, slo-mo style, covers a variety of life milestones, from marriages and graduations to fishing excursions and new jobs, and is supported by the Sly and the Family Stone hit “Everyday People” to demonstrate how everyone’s life (and financial objectives) are unique.

The new creative and tagline aligned well with the brand’s objectives, and the visual interpretation of that concept was meant to be a crucial part of the brand’s expression moving ahead, in most cases appearing closely with its three business pillars: insurance, investment, and advice.

This campaign helped them gain popularity when they were still new and relatively unknown among Canadians.

Created by the agency Taxi, the campaign at its core was TV, as well as digital video, display ads, social media, and out-of-home advertising across major Canadian cities in English, French, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese.

Social Media Marketing

Canada life leverages social media to build a community of followers with whom they engage with consistent, relevant, and timely content. Their social media approach as a form of community marketing favours the engagements on their social media pages. 

The creative assets they use on their social media platforms are always attractive, relevant, and engaging. 

They also use social media platforms to run ads for various marketing objectives ranging from awareness, and consideration to conversion and they do this consistently. 

They have profiles on :

  •  Facebook – 10k+
  • Twitter – 5514 followers
  • Instagram – 7k+
  • Linkedin – 77.7k
  • Youtube – 1.6k subscribers

They have a swarm of followers on all platforms with Linkedin leading with 77.7k followers.

SEO Strategies

Marketing strategy of Canada life - Ubersuggest seo screenshotSource – Ubersuggest

As per SEO ranking, it is said that the number of keywords – below 500 is bad, above 1000 is good, and 10,000+ is amazing. As we can see, www.canadalife.com has 165,652 organic keywords and it’s considered amazing. That means the digital marketing of Canada Life is gaining an outstanding number of insights. 

Also, the traffic per month is around 7L which is amazing. This proves that Canada Life is fueled by a foolproof SEO strategy along with working hard enough to keep the brand soaring in the Google organic SERP results. 

Influencer Marketing

Canada Life does not seem to have any track record of Influencer Marketing save for the TV ads which could be considered influencer marketing in some sense.

Ecommerce strategies

Since the scope of CanadaLife does not include selling products, hence their reason for not implementing any E-commerce strategy. Although, they have a very excellent website.

Mobile App

Based on the Canada Life business model, there seems to be no need to invest in mobile applications. Although, their website is mobile responsive.

Content Marketing Strategies

Canada Life leverages content marketing very well. Their blog tagged “Insight and Advice” is the primary channel for their content marketing. Also, they engage their community on Social Media Platforms with these contents by posting excerpts of the content published and directing them to the blog.

Their blogs are tailored to answer questions which is why their blog titles are usually questions. Answering these questions is meant to give insight and advice just as their blog is tagged. 

Their blog follows a regular pattern of starting with the date and read-time, followed by the key takeaways in the article, an option to share the article, highlights of what’s in the article, and the article content, then they leave their readers with key takeaways from the article and an option to share the article again.

Canada Life also leverages youtube for its video marketing. They make short videos to inspire and educate their audience about them and their service packages. 

Digital Marketing Academic Challenge 2024 - DMAC

Conclusion – What’s unique in Canada Life marketing?

The reason for Canada Life’s massive growth is not questionable seeing their marketing effort. Kudos to the brains and hands behind their marketing strategy and implementation.

Canada Life obviously has an excellent marketing strategy mapped out for their business goals based on their business model. The basis of this must be a deep understanding of digital marketing and what strategies to implement and how. 

As a business owner, you have two options if indeed you want to thrive. One is that you or your marketing team can opt for MBA in Digital marketing and the other is to hire a digital marketing agency.

Although not all, more of Canada Life Marketing’s effort is on digital marketing. You can also consider4-month digital marketing course that teaches you the A-Z of digital marketing. 

When you know digital marketing so well, you can easily map out a local marketing strategy too.

Hopefully got a lot of value for your business’s marketing strategy reading the blog. Check our Knowledge Portal if you are interested in learning about various companies marketing strategies.

Please let us know in the comment box below if you have any questions or doubts. We would sincerely appreciate your feedback.

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Aditya Shastri

Lead Trainer & Head of Learning & Development at IIDE

Leads the Learning & Development segment at IIDE. He is a Content Marketing Expert and has trained 6000+ students and working professionals on various topics of Digital Marketing. He has been a guest speaker at prominent colleges in India including IIMs......[Read full bio]

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