Bilingual brand and content development
Building a bilingual English and Cantonese content system from zero — tone of voice to onboarding copy.
Building Avo Insurance's bilingual content system from zero: brand voice, style guide and UX copy in English and Cantonese.
Metrics and outcomes
The challenge
Avo Insurance launched its digital insurance product with no content foundation behind it: no brand voice, no style guide, no content strategy. The business need was an architecture that could carry brand, organic impressions, governance and in-app conversion, instead of one-off rounds of copy.
The target audience was younger Hong Kong users who expected insurance to feel human, but most Hong Kong insurance copy at the time read like a legal document. The brand needed to present general insurance as casual yet credible, direct yet warm, and it had to do that in two languages.
The problem to solve: build a bilingual content system able to carry one consistent voice across English and Cantonese, and to earn trust, impressions, conversion and a decent user experience along the way.
Gathering insights
Discuss with business
First, I needed to understand Avo Insurance's position, product offering and user personas. For instance, how would a general insurance product built around everyday life stay relevant to a Gen-Y audience, and what do people actually ask about the Voluntary Health Insurance Scheme (VHIS) or cancer cover?
Competitor research
I then looked into other companies like Bowtie, OneDegree and Lemonade in the US, and worked out how Avo could sharpen its brand assets, storytelling and ease of navigation. I also researched what users look for in general insurance and what the angle should be.
Aligning with stakeholders
Taking a new content direction takes approvals. A lot of time went into getting business stakeholders on board, including underwriters, the actuarial team and management, and into balancing all parties’ priorities.
Ideation
Devised Avo's first bilingual editorial style guide
The guide set the brand's tone of voice, approved terminology, sentence-length norms and bilingual equivalence rules, giving product and marketing a shared language as the product scaled.
Designed the full UX content
With the system in place, UX copy followed across two surfaces: the product page, explaining what each policy covers and how to get a quote in plain, jargon-free English and Cantonese; and the onboarding flow, carrying the same casual-but-professional tone from plan selection through confirmation, including error states and empty states.
Wrote blog posts based on trends and searches
Reframed the content strategy around posts that answered real search queries, which lifted organic traffic by 50%.
Every piece of copy was checked against three criteria: did it match the tone guide, did it work in the UI layout, and did the Cantonese carry the same register as the English.
Results
- 5 key artefacts delivered: editorial style guide, localisation guide, content strategy guide, UX writing tone of voice, SEO writing direction
- 50% organic traffic increase by focusing on general insurance-related queries
- Set the brand taglines in both languages
