The turning of the insurance market cycle has always presented a dilemma for marketers and the anticipated softening of the market in 2025 is no different.
In August 2024, the Financial Times reported that Admiral had already started to “trim” premium prices a year after its chief executive confirmed initial signs of the market cycle turning.
However, while most media reports about changes to the market cycle are focussed on price, some marketers believe that client attrition can be managed – to some degree – with more of a focus on brand positioning to stimulate buyer loyalty.
Among them is Hannah Robinson, director of marketing at Kingsbridge Group, a broker that works across the cyber, trades and SME segments.
During Robinson’s tenure, Kingsbridge has abandoned campaign-focussed marketing in favour of developing longer term client relationships to improve brand loyalty.
“We’ve moved away from promotional, campaign-led marketing to position ourselves as a comprehensive business partner and avoid cheapening our brand. We found, when analysing long-term spend, discounts didn’t bring in more revenue, they just brought high-spend peaks,” she explains.
“Rather than offering discounts or vouchers, we lead with the merits of the package itself. We need to educate people on the importance of saying insured rather than giving them money off. This means harder work for us, but a better outcome for the customer.”
Building personas
Robinson has led the marketing team to get a much better understanding of the target markets that they serve and has worked with other stakeholders in the business to refresh the group’s understanding of current and prospective clients.
“It’s important to understand whether something has shifted, fully understand who they are, what their interests are, and where we can reach them in environments that they already associate with trust,” she explains.
The business has been exploring out of home (OOH) campaigns for later in 2024, and Robinson believes that a better understand of the target market will inform the choice of location.
“We’re looking at football pitches to access the ‘tradie’ audience, but so much needs to go into making sure we’re not coming straight after an advert that people don’t have that emotional connection with, and asking them to shift gear too quickly,” she says. “A large proportion of our marketing effort and spend is going into persona building and getting to know our audience a lot better.”
Another initiative that Kingsbridge has been focussed on has been in better analysing data it has on client referrals and customer spend.
“We’ve pulled our top 60 referrers over the last five years or so and ask them to tell us why they think we’re worth referring, in exchange for a reward,” Robinson says.
“We’re also trying to reach out to customers that haven’t spent with us to find out why our product wasn’t quite right for them, why we didn’t manage to build that emotional connection with them, and how we can make that better in future.”
Monitoring brand
Robinson’s team are using brand monitoring software to track social media mentions and measure the brand’s performance against competitors. The business is collaborating with its peers to gather wider datasets on customer behaviour.
“We run an overarching industry piece of research each year that we use as the backbone of our customer metrics,” she explains. “By working with other companies in the industry, we gain a much wider reach and a more comprehensive data set. We also analyse the holes in that data, going to our customers to either validate it or fill in the gaps.”
Despite the work that Kingsbridge puts into data analytics, Robinson cautions marketers against abandoning their ‘gut feeling’ when coming to decision making.
“Analysing data is now such an established practice that a marketer’s initial gut feeling is often overlooked,” she says. “When you’re so immersed in your audience and know them so well, your gut feeling can tell you why something looks like it’s working, even if you can’t point to the data right now.
“Gut feeling can help you work out which metrics you should be looking out for, but that does come with a lot of responsibility. Before pressing ahead, you have to sit with your data-driven compliance officer to demonstrate why you have the feeling and get the go-ahead.”