Maintaining global brand consistency in a developing industry is a mean feat for any marketer. Aon’s Alexandra Lewis and her team reflect on how approaches have changed and what’s coming next…
The insurance landscape has transformed since Aon was founded in 1987. The rise of the digital age has seen a shift away from the traditionally relationship-driven insurance model, with advancing automations such as digital risk processing reducing the need for human contact.
When Alexandra Lewis joined Aon in 2005 as a media relations manager, she would manually rifle through press cuttings as part of her day-to-day. Eighteen years later and Alex has localised her expertise into Aon’s reinsurance marketing arm, becoming chief marketing officer of reinsurance in 2021.
In an ever-evolving industry, a consistent customer journey – the idea that clients experience the same version of a brand over an extended period – is key. Marketing materials, therefore, must be adaptable across a variety of channels.
“Even a few years ago, many tended to avoid social media and focus on face-to-face relationships. While relationships remain at the heart of the reinsurance business, it’s really important to explore all ways to engage with clients and markets,” Lewis said in an interview with Financial Promoter at this year’s Rendez-Vous de Septembre (RVS) in Monte Carlo.
Fostering trust
According to McKinsey, “consistency is important to forge a relationship of trust with customers.”
Its well-documented “three Cs of customer satisfaction” notes that customers within financial services typically trusted banks that were in the top quartile of delivering consistent customer journeys 30% more those in the bottom quartile.
While the McKinsey research was B2C focussed, additional research by Acrolinx found that only 19% of companies deliver messaging that is both consistent and high-quality to their customer bases.
With the success rate this low, it is easy to see why Aon is dedicating time to ensuring it achieves consistency in the lead up to the all-important insurance market 1 January renewal season.
Lewis’s colleague, David Poulteney, is the marketing lead for global insights at the business. He has also been involved in crafting the organisation’s key message of “optimising capital strategies” for five international events in 2023, further localising the marketing around the message for each specific meeting or convention.
“When a client comes to an event, such as Monte Carlo, we want them to get the same Aon experience if they attend another renewal conference in say Brazil, Germany, or Singapore.
“We want the messaging to be clear, concise, and ultimately helpful for the client,” says Poulteney.
Building a consistent message across a global brand requires a strategic marketing department and support from C-suite colleagues. The Covid-19 pandemic shifted the landscape for marketers, particularly within the insurance industry, with relationships between colleagues and clients shifting online.
Aon filled a void by creating an online microsite to ensure its clients have access to insights and innovation, wherever they are in the world.
The site is a webinar-led platform with events for clients and internal brokers combined with interviews and panels discussions that include Aon colleagues and their partners.
The platform has allowed the company to amplify its presence at global “in-person” events at Monte Carlo, APCIA, FIDES, NAMIC, Baden, and SIRC through additional virtual fireside chats and a comprehensive suite of content, including thought leadership and solutions relating to the renewal season.
“The platform brings out our key messages and the ways that we’re helping our clients,” Lewis explains.
“That’s building reinsurer relationships, helping to differentiate clients, and also thinking about different types of capital sources.”
Data analysis and targeting
Lewis is keen to emphasise how the business has altered its approach to be more keenly data-focussed in recent years.
She says her division has been “transformed” in terms of its data usage and how it applies insights from those data.
“There’s a much higher expectation now to justify our spending – there’s no excuse for not providing meaningful data. We collect data for a whole variety of different channels and are constantly looking at data and asking ‘how can we do better?’”
One method of improving data is the well-trodden path of A/B testing, a favourite among B2B marketers. This technique involves sending two different versions of an email (or direct message) to two sample groups and then measuring the performance of each.
“When you’re receiving so many emails in a day, you make the decision in a second whether you are going to open this or not. We also look at click-to-open rates, asking where we are driving traffic,” says Lewis.
Monitoring the levels of engagement with email marketing creates a feedback loop that allows the team to further refine its targeted audience. In recent years, Aon’s marketing has shifted to focus on lead generation – the process of creating and capturing consumer interest through the marketing of products or services – including experimenting with new document ads.
“The most important thing is how it leads back,” Lewis explains. “… not just to new sales, but also the retention of our clients.
“At Monte Carlo, we have been asking how we can help deliver for our existing, as well as prospective, clients. We will explore who has attended and what impact that has on our revenue.”
Strategic marketing
Aon’s internal marketing has increasingly become more strategic as the needs of its colleagues have adapted.
“Five years ago, we’d give brokers a report and say “enjoy.” Now we’re teasing out key talking points and providing them with a deck that they can use with their clients,” Lewis says.
“Strategic marketing is integral to the brilliant running of any business.”
As marketing departments are becoming more customer focussed across the financial services landscape and thus more intertwined with the sales process, marketers recognise the need to adapt their channels.
“It’s important for us to make sure that we are making connections with colleagues and passing marketing campaigns right down to the colleagues who are on the ground,” says Lewis.
Aon has focused on consolidating its content in recent years, notably through its “ultimate guide to the insurance renewals.”
“In the past, we used to have a selection of materials – four or five different reports – but this year we have consolidated all the key takeaway information into one document, which seems to have gone down very well with our delegates,” says Poulteney.
Aon’s senior marketing team believe that expanding social media use is a simple way to ensure colleagues are invested in and understand more context around their campaigns.
“We’ve really tried to ramp up our social media over the past couple of years,” Lewis explains. “We are using our colleagues as our spokespeople, taking a far more personal route and celebrating our people.”
In her role as CMO, Lewis believes that providing clients with a consistent social media message ensures clients remain at the centre of every campaign. When strategizing for events, Aon’s marketing team start by talking to members of the leadership team, such as the head of global strategy and head of broking, to discuss where Aon stands out among its peers.
“We have the foundations and from there we build out the jigsaw and the pieces of the puzzle to bring that to life,” Lewis says.
Aon’s future marketing strategy revolves around its strategy and technology group, asking “how we can create more resilient insurance companies and a stronger industry by looking beyond the value of the reinsurance transaction, and enhancing how the business runs effectively, right through to growth opportunities.”
“It puts us in a really exciting position to bring something new to our clients,” Lewis says. “You have to match the client’s needs with our expertise and capabilities.”
Crucially, Lewis pinpoints that the strategic approach “starts with the client, rather than us.”
“How do we understand what’s at the heart of their business plans for the year ahead,” she asks. “Then we need to understand how we help fit around that. How we bring that alive is based upon what we want to say and who we want to say it to.”
Aon’s significant presence at the RVS event in Monte Carlo allowed the company to host numerous interviews with key stakeholders in a heavily branded environment, reinforcing its “optimising capital strategies” messaging.
Poulteney explains that the team used the event to askquestions about client needs and encouraged colleagues to talk about pain-points that remain front of mind.
“It’s about asking the question first, and then showcasing Aon’s solutions,” he says.
With a team of over 900 colleagues focusing on data and analytics, and annual investments into analytics of over 100 million, Aon’s marketing has to champion its differences.
Looking forward, Aon will use the data captured at its events to improve year on year marketing communications and perform event more sophisticated techniques in the future.
“After this event, we’ll do a survey with our colleagues on how it went. We want to hear how we can take it up a level next year,” says Lewis.
Aon’s marketing team not only wants to continue on its growth trajectory, but also further its collaboration within the wider business.
This article is taken from the print edition of Financial Promoter. Click here to subscribe.