IMCA Trailblazer Award winners
share marketing trends and tips
By Christopher W. Cook
For whatever reason, when I hear the word marketing, it makes me think of an older episode of The Simpsons. (When you think about it, just about anything can lead you back to that show.)
Anyhoo, in “Grift of the Magi,” Springfield Elementary goes broke after owing all its money to the mobster Fat Tony’s construction company to pay for a faulty project—it built an elaborate handicap ramp system out of breadsticks, which immediately collapsed. (Payment was still required.)
A toy company, Kid First Industries, swoops in to save the day, bringing its team members on board to replace the school’s faculty. But instead of teaching the normal curriculum, they switch gears to teach toy design and marketing so the students can help create the upcoming holiday season’s hottest new toy. (The result was Funzo, a creepy Furby-ish animatronic that was “soft and cuddly with lots of fire power.”) Hilarity followed; the late Gary Coleman had a cameo; it’s still good stuff.
While teaching kids marketing to design a toy seems brilliant, the episode above aired in December 1999. A lot has changed in the marketing world since then.
Back in June, the Insurance Marketing & Communications Association (IMCA) held its IGNITE conference in Orlando. During its Reach Further Soiree, winners of the group’s annual awards were announced, including this year’s Trailblazer awards. Since my example of marketing dates back 25 years ago, we’ll have this year’s winners tackle and share current marketing trends and best practices to approach them.
Kenny McClinton
For Kenny McClinton, director of digital marketing at Risk Strategies, one key to success involves marketing and sales teams being on the same page.
“The biggest success factors I’m seeing when it comes to sales and marketing alignment is the clear definition and communication of goals and making sure both teams are supporting one another to achieve them,” he says. “In sales, the goal is to build relationships, understand challenges faced by clients, and utilize expertise to deliver the best possible outcome.
“The goal of marketing is to build awareness, create a positive brand impression, nurture engagement, and ultimately connect interested prospective clients to experts that can help solve their needs.”
McClinton believes that the key to ensuring alignment between the two teams is by “having a clearly defined buyers’ journey that is created collaboratively by sales and marketing leadership,” he says. “Defining the journey should start at the top of the marketing funnel, move through the sales process, and into client servicing.
“When done right, an omnichannel campaign can help a business penetrate key markets in a way that builds awareness, generates leads, and ultimately leads to winning business.”
—Kenny McClinton
Director, Digital Marketing
Risk Strategies
“This way there is a shared vision and consistent experience when it comes to attracting the right audience, winning business, and providing excellent client service,” McClinton adds.
As we know, your clients want to do business with you where they are, and between your agency websites and the multitude of social media platforms in which you have a presence, that can be many places. How can marketing teams keep a consistent brand campaign across an omnichannel environment?
“The biggest challenge associated with an omnichannel approach is the level of planning required,” says McClinton. “All campaign resources, assets, and the deployment schedule must be aligned to come together at the right time. A campaign involving owned, earned, and paid channels requires careful coordination between internal and external stakeholders to ensure maximum effectiveness of the distribution plan.”
To stay on top of things, “aligning omnichannel campaigns with company growth initiatives and pre-planning well in advance is key,” he adds. “True omnichannel campaigns require large resource commitments. Clear objectives and thorough pre-planning are essential to help ensure that the calculated return on investment justifies the lift associated with such campaigns.
“When done right, an omnichannel campaign can help a business penetrate key markets in a way that builds awareness, generates leads, and ultimately leads to winning business,” McClinton says.
A hot topic in all industries today is the use of artificial intelligence. As for marketing in the insurance industry, a focus is how best to use it and how to do so securely and ethically.
“The most common way that I’m seeing AI being used is with content creation,” McClinton says. “One way AI can help scale content creation and amplify the reach of a particular piece of information is content repurposing. An example would be taking a single piece of longer content like a white paper or webinar recording and then using AI to help turn it into multiple pieces of content, like social posts, infographics or short-form videos to help promote the asset and boost engagement.
“From a marketing effectiveness standpoint, it is important to view an AI tool as complementary to, not a replacement of, human content creators. The type of content that is ranking well and leading to conversions is still heavily skewed towards human generated content, possibly with some AI assistance, and not the other way around.
“From a security standpoint, it’s important for marketers to lean on their IT, cybersecurity, and legal teams for guidance on the approval of tools, use cases, and the types of data being inputted into AI tools,” McClinton concludes.
“Insurance marketers should shift from viewing marketing as a ‘campaign’ to an ‘always-on’
format. Programmatic advertising and AI tools facilitate this at scale.”
—Richard Look
President and Chief Strategist
Vertibrands
Richard Look
President and Chief Strategist of Vertibrands Richard Look echoes the statement regarding using generative AI for content development.
“Generative AI has revolutionized insurance marketing, especially in creating blogs, bylined articles, press releases, web copy, SEO content, social media posts, and promotional copy,” he says. “While it remains essential for a marketing professional to maximize its output and for a subject matter expert to edit for specific brand use, it is a powerful tool that benefits everyone.”
Look has observed an increase in the use of AI for content development by marketing departments and service providers. “This approach significantly reduces costs for businesses needing general content for their websites, brochures, sales sheets, social media posts, or blogs,” he says. “AI can produce a month’s worth of content in a single day.
“However, there are potential downsides, such as the risk of pulling information from copyright-protected sources or generating content with factual inaccuracies or misunderstandings, particularly with complex insurance products and regulations.”
For that reason, Look says, “it is crucial for marketing executives to lead content development with support from subject matter experts such as underwriters, risk managers, compliance officers, and policy administrators. This ensures that the brand voice remains consistent and the content accurate.”
To stay on top of the rapid changes involving AI content development, both internally and with external resources, Look recommends establishing and reviewing a written policy every six months. “Include a multi-step review and editing process to minimize errors,” Look adds, warning that AI is here to stay and that marketing executives resistant to its use will be replaced by those who know how to use it effectively.
Another trend he notices is the use of programmatic advertising, or the process of automatically buying and selling digital advertising spaces. “While programmatic advertising is familiar to consumers, it is relatively new in the B2B space, particularly in the insurance industry,” Look says. “It allows clients to reach brokers or buyers with multiple messages and drive interest to landing pages that initiate sales funnels.
“Though not suitable for everyone, it can generate up to five times the web traffic and lead generation results at a fraction of the cost of pay-per-click (PPC).”
In today’s marketing world, Look finds that email blasting for business development is outdated and ineffective. “Instead, use programmatic advertising, which aligns your target digital personas with digital device IDs,” he says. “Programmatic ads run on websites with public ad banners visited by your prospects during their everyday browsing. When clicked, these ads drive prospects to specific landing pages that start your sales funnel or increase website visits. It’s a critical tactic to developing first-party data over time, which is the kind of data that will be critical to a cookie-less world for long-journey conversions.
“Insurance marketers should shift from viewing marketing as a ‘campaign’ to an ‘always-on’ format. Programmatic advertising and AI tools facilitate this at scale.”
To implement and execute a programmatic advertising strategy, Look advises to “utilize a proven digital marketing platform like Insurance Media Exchange to reach agents, insurers, intermediaries, and insureds using programmatic ads, landing pages, and marketing automation,” he says.
“The ads are non-intrusive, and advertisers have no Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on prospects until they complete a form on the landing page or website. The always-on format allows for retargeting ads to remind prospects about the advertiser’s offer through several different marketing messages,” he explains.
“Marketers also need to prepare for the adoption of Unified ID 2.0 (UID2), a privacy-conscious identifier for digital advertising created from a user’s email address or phone number. UID2 helps advertisers target specific consumers with personalized ads while protecting their privacy, independent of third-party cookies being phased out by most browsers.”
The final trend Look shares is competitor digital marketing. “Numerous digital tools are available for advertisers, including URL retargeting, which targets visitors to specific pages of a competitor’s website, such as blogs or product pages. For example, to target brokers writing nonprofit business, retarget MGA and carrier pages specific to nonprofits visited by producers with nonprofit business,” Look says.
“When targeting a specific URL, you are at the mercy of all the visitors, even those who are not your prospects. For instance, an underwriting software company targeting similar insurtech websites may find that the majority of visitors are not CIOs or insurance IT executives but other vendors seeking to sell their API or solution to the company. This can result in higher ad waste than is typical with digital targeting.”
To help with this issue, “work with a proven digital insurance marketing provider to limit waste by using filters for agents and brokers, insurers, or other providers. While not exact, this increases the overall effectiveness of an always-on initiative,” Look concludes.
“It has been engrained in our minds that ‘no one will watch it if it’s longer than 30 seconds.’ We already thought that was short; we now understand that today’s attention span is only eight seconds! It’s even more important to keep videos short and sweet.”
—Taylor Hughes
Marketing Coordinator
CRC Insurance Services
Taylor Hughes
For Taylor Hughes, marketing coordinator for CRC Insurance Services, a challenge in the marketing world today is the use of data. “Data is easy to collect, but hard to use,” she says. “We’ve all known the importance of keeping and tracking data for many years now, but it truly takes a team who can interpret this data and put it to a larger use. Knowing when and how your audience wants to consume their info can be a difficult ask.
“Luckily, technology has advanced and continues to help make this data easier to obtain and use. Many email systems and website platforms track details of who you are, and the days and times you’ve shown interest. Then, they start to automate some of this personalization for us.
“It isn’t all manual tracking,” Hughes continues. “For example, you type in a website URL, navigate to ‘contact us,’ search for the person you’re looking for, find their contact info, and call them. That’s a lot of effort when now, the next time you navigate to that URL, you won’t have to search too far. The contact info for the person you need is stuck right there on the home page so you can do business faster.”
For individuals still intimidated by the collection of and use of data, Hughes recommends:
- Using segmentation to improve personalization. “For email marketing, we take a group of people with like behaviors and tailor messaging or imagery based on their interests,” she says.
- Keeping your data clean. “Fix mistakes, and update your data often. Dirty data could be harmful if you start personalizing to the wrong person/name/behavior/etc.,” Hughes says.
- Using journey mapping to personalize content. “If you know exactly where each person is in the sales process, then you can have touch points with them at every win, pain point, value add, etc., based on their timing and preferred flow,” she says. “Great customer service is a stand. Understanding your audience fully can teach you how to do better business.”
Another trend that Hughes is seeing is the use of A/B testing or comparing different versions of something to test which has a better performance.
“Cross-channel testing is new to me but has become a heavy focus,” she says. “Running unified A/B tests across social, web, email, etc., becomes increasingly important to gain a deeper understanding of how your audience behaves. Interpreting these tests across each of the marketing platforms, how they are similar and how they differ, allows us to deliver the right message at exactly the time, ultimately leading to making the sale.”
Hughes advises limiting the number of variables being tested. “Don’t test too many variables at once. For example, in email, I test one variable for opens (maybe it’s the subject line, day of the week, or time of day sent) and then one variable for clicks (could be call to actions, imagery, or even personalization),” she says.
“Continuously monitor your collected data throughout the entire marketing lifespan of your project. Sometimes the marketing magic happens before the end of your test! Keep your eyes on how your data will shift and change throughout the collection process, and make sure to test a large enough sample size. Running one test on a small group will not give you your most truthful data. Test over time for a long time,” she says.
Hughes has also been observing the trend of using video in marketing. “It has been engrained in our minds that ‘no one will watch it if it’s longer than 30 seconds.’ We already thought that was short; we now understand that today’s attention span is only eight seconds! It’s even more important to keep videos short and sweet,” she says.
Hughes also recommends thinking outside the box creatively. “I’ve watched 1,000 corporate videos with the clip of two people shaking hands; let’s stop making that a trend,” she says.
When it comes to incorporating video strategies into your marketing campaign, Hughes suggests always being prepared to capture content. “Anything and everything can be used to make a quick highlight video,” she says. “Fancy equipment isn’t as necessary anymore. If a video is taken on your phone, it’s now totally normal to shoot/post video in a vertical layout instead of horizontal.”
Videos can also be used to teach your target audience new ways to complete tasks. “Videos don’t just have to be fun; they can be informational—highlight your team or products, or tease things that are coming soon,” Hughes says. “We all want to feel included. Be interactive with video and allow space for questions, polls, clickable links, or quizzes to push the audience to engage with your content. We want conversational and real,” she concludes.
Hopefully the insight from this year’s IMCA Trailblazer Award winners will help guide your agencies with your future marketing strategies. And don’t forget to purchase a Funzo doll because, according to the advertisement in the episode of The Simpons, “if you don’t have Funzo, you’re nothing!”
For more information:
Insurance Marketing & Communications Association
imcanet.com
