Foremost’s Insurance’s Jeff Bair talks about Digital marketing
What are the biggest challenges for insurance marketing?
“One of the challenges we face in insurance marketing is probably consistent with what a lot of marketers face. That’s breaking through the clutter of existing communications. One of the concepts we use is C cubed. (With) each element, each C is symbiotic. They add to the strength of each other one when you’re deploying all three together. It would be for your marketing to be clear, concise and creative. The second challenge of the two is tied to the first one. That’s creating content that’s both meaningful but also comprehensible for both agents and customers.”
What opportunities and challenges does marketing to independent agents create?
"Now, because of the size of the business, when you have 66,000 locations, you can’t get to all of them in a car or all of them by phone. We have a large digital agent platform as well where we communicate to that group, about 18,000 agents in that group, strictly by email, but also, electronic events like our e-conference, which is a virtual trade show. It’s been about 10 years now we’ve been doing that. We connect with (2,000) to 3,000 agents about two times a year through that large format. Many members of our team are licensed agents. That helps with the communication process. You’re always trying to understand your customer. In this case, it’s the IA. You want to create content and campaigns that align with what their needs are. "
How do you communicate with policyholders, employees and agents across digital platforms?
"They are looking to be cutting-edge leaders. They’re the ones that are, in fact, changing how we think about certain platforms right now. They’re ensuring our collateral across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram—that’s our three main platforms—remains consistent. That basic alignment is along what we call a product ecosystem. One of the things we’ve done because of all the products we have, depending upon how you count them, there are between 16 and 20. Some of them have very specific seasonality. We’ve built a calendar where every month, we’re featuring one of our products, or maybe sometimes more so we can get all 16 or 20 in. We not only do that in our messaging to agents, but we sprinkle that across all our social outlets. Our agent communication and our social outlet communication are both aligned. That way, if agents are following us and they’re posting, too, they’re aligned with the messaging they’re receiving."
