No one purchases insurance without doing their research. It is, after all, a high-consideration purchase. Whether someone is choosing motor, pet, home, life, health or business insurance, they are not simply buying a product. They are buying protection against something that may or may not happen, often with complex conditions attached. This is what makes confidence critical. This is no short sales cycle because a customer may compare several providers, policies and prices before committing. They might search Google, visit an insurer’s website, read reviews, consult a comparison site, ask a question on social media, ask AI, return to the website and then leave again. The customer is not necessarily saying no, they may simply not be confident enough to say yes.
That is the ‘confidence gap’, that pivotal point where a potential customer is interested in an insurance product but does not have enough clarity, evidence or trust to take the next step. The FCA itself recognises that confidence is fundamental to the insurance purchase decision with 31% of consumers saying there isn’t enough information to judge the quality of different insurance policies. In this article we’ll be looking at how to close that confidence gap, the role of Consumer Duty, and how some of the biggest insurance brands stack up.
Highly Competitive Landscape
If you’re in the insurance industry, you know it is massive. The 2026 Fortune Global 500 illustrates the extraordinary size of the industry’s leading companies. Among the listed life and health insurers, China Life reported revenue of approximately $178.2 billion, Ping An $158.6 billion, Allianz $134.0 billion, LIC $110.3 billion and AXA $107.7 billion.
According to Brand Finance’s Insurance 100 2026, the world’s 100 most valuable insurance brands had a combined value of $606.7 billion, up 14% year on year. Ping An has held the position as the world’s most valuable insurance brand for ten consecutive years. These figures should not be confused with customer satisfaction or marketing effectiveness. Revenue measures financial scale, while brand value is a valuation methodology; neither tells us whether an individual customer understands a policy.
They do, however, illustrate the scale of the competitive environment. The world’s largest insurance brands are competing not only through products and pricing, but through the value attached to the brand itself. Let’s dig in and see how customers define brand value.
Insurance Customers Want Reassurance, Not Just Price
EIOPA’s 2025 Eurobarometer found that 62% of EU consumers own household insurance and 57% own vehicle insurance. Yet only 53% trust insurers to ensure a good consumer outcome. Interesting that more than half the consumers surveyed lacked confidence in their insurer. As a marketer, that creates a range of opportunities in your sales funnel, starting from your marketing content.
First, for insurance, the purchase journey is not purely digital. Among consumers who bought insurance during the previous two years, 24% did so only online, 37% only in person or over the phone with an agent or broker, and 15% used both online and offline channels, according to the EIOPA 2025 research.
If you’re marketing an insurance product, you need to understand that your website, agents, comparison sites, and social media channels are not separate experiences in your customer’s mind. They are all part of the same brand. If one says something different from another, or if one makes the customer work considerably harder to understand the product, and confidence can disappear.
Where The Confidence Gap Begins
When someone is looking for insurance they have basic questions they want answered. What is covered exactly? How does it suit my needs? What does it cost? What happens if I need to claim? If the customer cannot quickly find a credible answers, uncertainty fills the space. Insurance is particularly vulnerable to this because its value is intangible. Customers cannot test the protection before they buy it. In many cases, they only discover its true value when something goes wrong.
That is where good insurance marketing has a job to do. Let’s break down where it goes wrong.
#1 Poorly structured websites
Insurance websites can contain enormous amounts of information while still failing to answer the questions customers actually have. The problem is not necessarily a lack of content but often how it is presented and structured.
Here’s a quick test for your site, how quickly can you find the answers to:
- What is this?
- Is it relevant to me?
- What does it cover?
- What is the cost?
- What is not covered?
- What happens next?
If those answers are scattered across product pages, PDFs, FAQs and buried terms and conditions, the customer has to do the work. And that creates friction at precisely the point where your brand needs to be building confidence.
#2 Complex language
Insurance has its own vocabulary: excess, indemnity, exclusions, endorsements, beneficiaries, underwriting, premiums and deductibles. While some terminology is unavoidable, making customers decode it themselves is not.
The FCA’s Consumer Duty requires firms to support consumer understanding, with communications designed to meet customers’ information needs, be likely to be understood and equip customers to make effective, timely and properly informed decisions. The FCA also requires communications to be clear, fair and not misleading. The regulator’s guidance specifically discusses the use of plain and intelligible language, logical presentation and making key information prominent and easy to identify. But even more than being compliant to a regulator, transparent communications helps close the confidence gap.
#3 Unclear coverage, exclusions and pricing
Few things destroy confidence faster than the suspicion that something important has been left unsaid. That might be an exclusion, excess, limitation, additional charge or condition that only becomes apparent after the customer has committed. The FCA’s insurance rules require firms to provide customers with appropriate information about a policy in good time and in a comprehensible form so they can make an informed decision.
Consumer Duty Is Critical To Your Insurance Content
We’ve touched above on Consumer Duty, but lets take a deeper dive in your obligations around marketing content. At its heart, the framework is designed to improve outcomes for retail customers.
The FCA’s 2026 review of consumer understanding states that customers should receive the information they need, at the right time and in a way they can understand. The regulator identifies consumer understanding as one of the outcomes under Consumer Duty and links it directly to customers making effective, timely and properly informed decisions.
What this means for insurance marketing is that content needs to consider whether the customer can understand the product. Whether important exclusions and limitations are sufficiently clear, that pricing and value are explained transparently, and if information appears at the point when it is actually needed.
It also needs to consider whether the communication is appropriate for its intended audience and whether different channels provide a consistent picture of the product. Which means this does not stop at the website. The FCA’s Consumer Duty rules apply to communications before, during and after a sale, including verbal, visual and written communications across channels such as social media.
Education Can Be A Differentiator
Insurance marketing often thinks it needs to either educate the customer or sell to them. In reality, the two can work together. Think about the questions customers ask before they are ready to buy:
- Do I need home insurance?
- What does comprehensive car insurance cover?
- Does travel insurance cover cancelled flights?
- How much life insurance do I need?
- What is an insurance excess?
- Does home insurance cover flooding?
- What happens if my car is written off?
Going beyond your SEO strategy, a useful article, explainer, calculator, video or FAQ can answer a question before it becomes a reason not to buy. It can also give the customer a reason to believe that the insurer understands the problem they are trying to solve. That is particularly relevant as search behaviour becomes more conversational. A customer asking an AI tool or search engine whether a particular insurance policy covers something is demonstrating a confidence gap. The insurer that has already provided a clear, authoritative answer has an opportunity to enter that decision process before a competitor does.
Good insurance marketing does not simply tell customers that a product is valuable. It helps them understand why it is relevant to them, what it does, what it does not do and what they should consider before buying it. This means clarity can be your competitive advantage.
See examples of educational articles Contentworks has provided for their financial services clients.
Clarity of Communication
George Bernard Shaw once said “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
Clarity does not mean making short sentences and short pages on your site. Insurance products can require detailed explanations, and trying to reduce everything to a few lines can actually create more ambiguity. The challenge is to create a hierarchy of information so customers can understand the important points without having to become insurance experts. That means putting the essential answer first, then allowing customers to go deeper when they need to. Good insurance content might include clear product pages, genuine FAQs, comparison content, coverage and exclusion explainers, pricing explanations and straightforward calls to action.
It also means thinking about the questions behind the questions. A customer asking “How much does home insurance cost?” may really be asking if they can pay monthly. Someone asking “Does comprehensive car insurance cover everything?” may really be asking for a breakdown on what is covered. The content needs to address the underlying concern, not just match the keyword. And Consumer Duty comes in here as well. In your attempt to be brief and to highlight benefits, have you remembered to place the risks, exclusions, or costs in close proximity to the benefits?
Trust Needs Evidence
One of the least trusted sentences in the English language must be “trust us”. Trust is not something you state, it is built through evidence. That might include expertise, claims information, customer reviews, clear policy documentation, regulatory transparency, consistent messaging, accessible customer service information and credible thought leadership.
Claims deserve particular attention. EIOPA’s 2026 supervisory priorities report found that only 62% of EU consumers were satisfied with the claims-handling process for the relevant insurance products they owned. Satisfaction varied by product, at 74% for health insurance, 70% for motor third-party liability, 64% for household insurance and 61% for natural catastrophe coverage.
For an insurer, that makes claims content, marketing content. Explaining what happens after an accident, how a claim works, what evidence may be required and where customers can get help can build confidence before a claim ever happens.
Read more on how Contentworks Helps Finance Brands Earn and Keep It, as published on Business Matters, the UK’s leading business magazine.
Consider The Entire Customer Journey
Confidence needs to be built progressively, because customers rarely make an insurance decision after seeing a single advert or landing on a single product page.
- At the search stage, the customer is trying to understand a risk or product.
- On the website, they are assessing credibility and relevance.
- During comparison, they are evaluating price, coverage, exclusions and value.
- At consideration, they are looking for reassurance
- During the application they need confidence that they understand what they are buying.
After purchase, the relationship changes again. Customers need to know how to manage the policy, what happens when circumstances change and where they can get help. At claims, the promise of protection is where the true test lies.
A brand can lose confidence at any one of these points. That is why insurance marketing should not be assessed solely on how many leads a campaign generates. The more revealing question is where customers hesitate, abandon a journey, return to search, contact support or leave for another provider. Those behaviours can reveal where the confidence gap actually exists.
Customers Can Switch So Why Do They Stay?
Here’s a stat to scare the most stoic of marketers. 61% of motor insurance customers and 49% of contents and buildings insurance customers switched provider in the previous three years. The figures are particularly striking because motor and home insurance are often products customers purchase repeatedly, giving them regular opportunities to reconsider the relationship.
So why do people switch?
- FCA research found that among policyholders who had switched, 89% of motor insurance switchers and 90% of contents and buildings insurance switchers said their premium was too high. That puts pricing, value and communication firmly into the retention conversation.
- The renewal experience is particularly interesting. Research commissioned by the FCA’s Consumer Panel found that 80% of consumers surveyed received a higher car insurance renewal premium, 72% received a higher home insurance premium and 51% received a higher travel insurance premium.
- And 85% of consumers who negotiated their car insurance renewal price with their existing provider actually secured a reduction.
The lesson is not simply that insurers need cheaper premiums. It is that customers need to understand the value exchange. If the price changes, can the customer understand why? When the cover changes, is that clear? Should the policy remain competitive, has the insurer actually explained why? Retention is easier to build when customers feel informed rather than surprised, and that is where marketing, customer communications and the wider customer experience increasingly overlap.
Brand And Performance Must Work Together
This is why insurance marketing needs both performance and brand. Performance marketing can capture customers when they are actively looking for insurance, while SEO can put an insurer in front of people researching risks and coverage. Paid search can capture high-intent demand, comparison content can help customers evaluate options, social media can provide education and reassurance, and PR and thought leadership can establish authority beyond the immediate sales message. These activities do not operate independently.
A customer may click a paid advert, visit the website, read three articles, check reviews, search the company name, look at the claims process and return a week later to buy. At every stage, they are asking themselves a slightly different version of the same question: “Can I trust this company to do what I need it to do?”
Your insurance strategy therefore needs to connect acquisition with confidence. Short-term performance activity can generate the initial interaction, but brand, content, experience and consistent communications help determine whether that interaction turns into a customer relationship.
Closing The Confidence Gap
Closing the confidence gap means identifying where customers lack confidence and building useful content around those moments. What question is the customer asking? How can you give them confidence to continue? What are your competitors saying to sway them?
At Contentworks, we work with financial services brands to turn complex products into clear, credible and compelling customer experiences. We also understand that regulated content is unwavering. Consumer Duty is not something to bolt onto marketing after the copy has been written. Customer understanding, clarity, transparency and informed decision-making need to be considered as part of the content strategy itself, especially when the product is complex or the decision carries significant financial consequences.
Book a Zoom call with our team to discuss your financial marketing.