Insurance Marketing: Why Everything You Knew about Branding has Changed

According to Andrew Simpson of Insurance Journal, customers aren't listening to marketers anymore. They're listening to each other.

"Today’s consumer will leverage pretty much everything except brand-centric content," said Kevin Brandt of Trusted Choice. "They’re going to look at the wealth of information that’s out there ... published by someone other than the brand."

Ratings. Reviews. Status updates. That's where today's consumers go for facts.

Why? For one thing, trust just isn't automatic anymore. Consumers, especially younger ones, don't assume the media is reliable, they don't assume that people with fancy titles are necessarily doing a good job, and they certainly don't assume that a “corporation” can be trusted to tell the truth.

For another, the market is saturated with marketing. Brandt said that "the average consumer receives more than 5,000 marketing messages per day and ... [they] don't open 90 percent of the corporate marketing emails they receive."

Of course, standing out is a perennial challenge. But it's no longer enough to say you've got the credentials or the history. Quite the opposite. The corporate voice has lost credibility over the last few decades: anything you say about yourself is likely to fall flat. Today's twenty- and thirty-somethings just don't buy into the warm fuzzies of a brand story the way their parents' generation did.

So the brand story is dead, right?

Wrong. Everything is a story. Your website and marketing materials, sure, but also a thousand other things, like the actual value you deliver, the way you respond to criticism on social media, the things people choose to say about you.

Some of that you can control. Some, you can't. But all of it fuses together in the minds of your audience like a mosaic, and that mosaic is your story.

What's the moral here?

In a word, payoff. Successful marketing isn't what you say about yourself. It's the payoff you deliver in return for customer engagement. In other words, you're not just in the business of insurance anymore. You're also providing answers, stories, information, a conversation, an experience. And whatever that combination may entail, it has to be quality.

Enter content marketing. Ryan Skinner of Forrester Research described it as "a marketing strategy where brands create interest, relevance and relationships with customers by producing, curating, and sharing content that addresses specific customer needs and delivers visible value."

In other words, marketing isn't just marketing. It's also a product. And if that product is good, your customers will go out of their way to consume it. But if it's thinly-disguised self-promotion, or a pack of keywords loosely strung together, or just not all that substantive, it'll go nowhere. Content and quality are nothing if not synonyms.

That said, we disagree with Simpson's observation that marketers have lost control of marketing. Rather, we’d say it's that the climate of marketing has changed, and in order to survive, marketers have to adapt.

Is it impossible to reach your audience? Absolutely not. Is trust a thing of the past? No. But the approach is different, and trust has to be earned – again, and again, and again – before you can expect your audience to bite.

For more information on how to leverage inbound marketing to walk your talk, click here.