Des Moines runs on insurance and insurance has a perception problem
The world's third-largest insurance hub, more carrier and annuity headquarters per capita than any other American city — competing for both customers and talent against an industry-wide reputation for being outdated.
Benchmarks in this market
- Qualified broker & advisor inquiries
- +161%Qualified broker & advisor inquiries
- Applicant quality on recruitment campaigns
- +44%Applicant quality on recruitment campaigns
- CAC on compliance-reviewed annuity funnels
- -29%CAC on compliance-reviewed annuity funnels
From Digital Squad client accounts in Des Moines. Orientation, not a guarantee — your starting point changes the range.
How we work here: Remotely from our San Francisco office, with CT coverage for calls and travel for kickoffs. We don't claim a Des Moines office we don't have.
Clients across every market
What's actually different about the Greater Des Moines area
Des Moines has been called the 'Hartford of the West' for over a century, and the title still holds: it's the world's third-largest insurance capital after Hartford and New York, with more insurance company headquarters per capita than any other major U.S. city, and over 100,000 Iowans working in insurance and financial services in the metro alone. Principal Financial Group — founded in 1879, with a five-building World Headquarters campus in downtown Des Moines and roughly 20,000 employees globally — anchors that identity. A few miles away in West Des Moines, Athene Holding sits at the center of the fixed-annuity and retirement-income business, backed by Apollo Global Management. F&G Annuities & Life and EMC Insurance Companies — the latter headquartered here for more than a hundred years and ranked among the nation's top 60 insurers by net written premium — keep their headquarters downtown as well, alongside Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield on Grand Avenue, which insures the majority of Iowa. That concentration means the buyers a Des Moines insurance marketer talks to — broker networks, MGA principals, actuarial and product teams — are genuinely sophisticated about the category, and generic 'protect what matters' messaging gets seen through immediately by people who've spent a career underwriting risk.
The industry is losing the talent argument to InsurTech and tech generally
Insurance turnover has climbed from a historical 8–9% to roughly 12–15% industry-wide, the median insurance worker is 44 against a national average of 42, and only about a quarter of the workforce is under 35 — because younger candidates default to seeing insurance as outdated and technologically behind, and take offers from InsurTech and tech companies instead. For a Des Moines carrier, that's a marketing problem before it's an HR problem: employer brand and recruitment marketing now compete directly with acquisition marketing for budget and attention.
Being #3 means fighting for national mindshare Hartford and New York don't have to
Hartford and New York carry a century of built-in category association that Des Moines has to earn explicitly in every piece of national content, every industry-conference presence, and every piece of thought leadership — the market's real depth doesn't automatically translate into the industry recognition a carrier headquartered here actually deserves.
Legacy trust signals are real, but most insurance marketing buries them
A hundred-year-old carrier or MGA has underwriting history, reserve strength, and licensed-state depth that a broker or risk manager checks before anything else — and most local insurance marketing leads with brand feeling instead of the specific proof point that buyer is actually looking for.
Annuity and retirement-product marketing answers to a slower, more regulated buying cycle
Athene and F&G sell fixed and indexed annuities through advisor and broker-dealer channels with real compliance review on every claim a piece of content makes — a funnel built for a direct-to-consumer purchase decision doesn't fit a product that gets recommended by an advisor months after first contact.
What usually moves first in Des Moines.
Based on what tends to be the binding constraint for companies in this market. Your audit may point somewhere else — we go where the numbers say.
Industry playbooks relevant in Des Moines
The part clients actually remember.
Not the reports. The uncomfortable conversation that changed the trajectory.
We were running two different companies out of one website and wondering why neither side converted well. Splitting them was obvious in hindsight and something we'd never have done ourselves.
We'd been quietly tracking diversion data for years because it was good practice, not because we thought anyone would pay for it. Turns out the properties we most wanted as clients had been asking every hauler for exactly that, and nobody was answering.
We'd been telling practices we'd get them paid faster for years. Nobody had told us that wasn't actually what was stopping them from switching — the fear of switching itself was, and once we addressed that directly instead of the speed pitch, everything else got easier.
Des Moines questions, answered straight.
Yes — recruitment and employer-brand marketing runs on the same discipline as customer acquisition: a specific audience, a real value proposition, and a funnel built to convert it, aimed at candidates instead of policyholders. Insurance's youth-perception problem is a positioning problem, and positioning is what we do.
Other markets we work in
Let's look at your numbers.
A free 30-minute teardown of your funnel, ads, and site — run against what actually works in the Greater Des Moines area. You keep the findings either way.