Category Archives: Insurance

Will we still wear lanyards? Addressing the challenge of B2B financial services events during social isolation

Thousands of people flying in from all over the country. Hotels filled to capacity. People packed shoulder-to-shoulder in an enclosed room. Handshakes and exchanges of business cards. Buffet dinners.

Almost everything about conferences seems foreign in our current reality. Indeed, most fall conferences have already announced that they will not take place in-person. Some have been postponed, some cancelled, many turned virtual. In a few cases, such as some recent investor conferences and a Forrester conference, the switch to remote has been seen as a success. In most cases, however, the decision to waive registration fees betrays a lack of confidence on the part of both sponsors and attendees about a virtual event’s ability to deliver value. But, you say, registrations and log-ins have increased as no travel expenses, no missed work and no registration fee lowered the decision bar almost to the floor. The problem: Any quantitative improvement likely masks a significant qualitative drop in engagement.

If we take a step back and think realistically about how conferences provide value, the situation becomes clear: Conferences create an opportunity for sponsors to get concentrated exposure to and interactions with their prospects; attendees get a break from their daily routine with the valid justification of an immersive opportunity to learn from experts and peers. Move the conference to the web and all those things disappear. Indeed, a virtualized conference in the form of a series of presentations becomes almost indistinguishable from a thematically-connected series of webinars.

As the threat of COVID stretches into the foreseeable future, it’s incumbent on all parties involved—the conference organizers, the sponsors and the prospective attendees—to think creatively about how to fashion virtual events into something that takes advantage of the positives and mitigates the negatives. Nothing about greater registration volume and potentially greater expert participation for a virtual event inherently leads to lower attendee engagement and fewer sales prospect interactions. In fact, it’s potentially quite the opposite. The first step down a path of creating valuable virtual events is to identify and isolate the key components of live events that people find valuable:

  • For sponsors: The value comes from getting their name and capabilities in front of their target audience and being able to engage with them directly to generate sales opportunities.
  • For attendees: The value comes from the opportunity to learn from industry experts and their peers, as well as the potential to find solutions to their business challenges.

Having identified these elements of value, the question then becomes: How can we create this value virtually, irrespective of the way it was generated in live events? The answers should produce a framework that would be more productive than putting two days’ worth of presentation sessions on the internet and offering virtual networking lounges that will never be used. Here are some of our ideas.

Generate marketing and sales value for sponsors:

  • Sponsored structured virtual chats and roundtables that create opportunities for peers to discuss topics of high relevance and interest to them, moderated by sponsor representatives
  • Sponsored virtual group icebreaker activities to help forge connections between peers from similar businesses and/or geographies
  • Tinder-style (“swipe right”, “swipe left”) sponsor pitches for 1:1 meetings to enable attendees to choose the sponsors with whom they want to interact, thus ensuring higher-quality conversations

Generate learning value for attendees:

  • A greater number of shorter sessions, spread over more days, because nobody will sit through multiple 45-minute online presentations
  • Asynchronous Q&A spanning the entire duration of the conference so that attendees have an opportunity to reflect on content, discuss it with teammates, and then pose questions
  • Multiple instances of live sessions to increase the options for attendees to join (thereby also increasing exposure for sponsors and presenters)
  • Small, structured breakouts to create substantive opportunities for attendees to learn from each other

We believe that these ideas serve as a good starting point and also enable a wide variety of iterations, depending on the specific sponsors and attendees and topics. They represent a sincere effort to do more than bide time until the business world “returns to normal” because at this point, it’s doubtful that anyone can accurately predict when that will really occur.

LIMRA Marketing & Research Conference Wrap-Up

EMI recently attended the LIMRA Marketing & Research Conference at Disney World. Our take-away from the conference: No business today can achieve sustainable growth and gain market share without being customer-centric. Easy to say, but less easy to implement.

As an exhibitor, we had dozens of conversations on companies reassessing and refining their client-centered strategies. The challenge of operating with a consumer marketing lens, versus the traditional product-centric lens, which so many companies have done, was well expressed in a recent McKinsey report* on U.S. retirement readiness:

[Providers] “have a unique, largely untapped opportunity…But to capture it, firms must stop driving product innovation based on actuarial models and instead lead with a strong consumer marketing lens…financial institutions must take a much stronger consumer view as they create new product prototypes.”

These challenges relate to how companies engage with their channel partners to enable customer-centric throughput. For example, one mutual fund leader at the Conference addressed investment language and how “financial security” resonates far more than “financial freedom.” An insurance leader explained the need to help agents establish an online social presence and keep diverse customers engaged through social media.

The LIMRA event helped us to crystalize several fundamental questions:

  • “Am I using customer-centricity to achieve competitive advantage with my channels and end-customers?”
  • “Is my organization unified in this approach, even if product, sales and research are in silos?”
  • “Am I extending my consumer-centric expertise and assets (e.g., research, collateral to advisor and agent channels) that arms advisors and agents with educational and motivational client tools?”
  • “Am I adapting core messaging to engage different generations, particularly as they age and their needs evolve, across relevant traditional and digital communications?”
  • “Am I preparing for what my distribution channels will need in the next two years based on what my research, marketing analysis and industry trends are reporting now?”

These questions speak to the need for strategies and tactics to help financial service institutions to grow share with their captive and third party distribution channels. EMI examined many of these questions at our recent webinar Four Strategies to Win the Hearts and Minds of Your Advisor Channel – and Grow Share which shows you the need for customer-centric throughput and the importance of building better advisor relationships that can be adapted to sales channels and ultimately end customers. This is a topical concern of research and marketing experts at investment and insurance firms alike as we clearly recognized at the LIMRA event.

 

* McKinsey & Company, “Why Are We Not There Yet? An Update on U.S. Retirement Readiness,” May 2013.

The Challenge of Improving Wholesaler Performance

Suffice it to say, sales leaders in the asset management, insurance, and retirement industries are under un-relenting pressure to enhance wholesaler performance.  Brands that want to win the trust of their channels and be perceived as a valuable, priority relationship, must deploy effective Intermediary Relationship Marketing (IRM).  Today, many brands deploy a version of IRM, most of which neither generate trust or add value to their relationship with their important intermediary partners.

What is Effective IRM?

In the context of the asset management, retirement, and insurance industry, IRM creates leverage and scale for distribution platforms targeting intermediaries and distributors. An IRM initiative augments the productivity of internal and external wholesalers through a pragmatically developed plan of systematic and integrated marketing activities. These activities:

  • Create a compelling, consistent and coherent narrative with target channels
  • Generate new qualified leads
  • Keep target channels engaged with your brand and products
  • Pave the way for more effective wholesaler interactions.

Instead of focusing on a single campaign, or a series of disconnected interactions, effective IRM initiatives plan and deploy integrated inbound and outbound communication streams — guided by the stage of your brand’s relationship with the channel, individual level data (e.g., behavioral, self-reported, firmographic), and your brand’s narrative. These communication streams increase the probability that your products and brand are selected by your target intermediaries and distributors. IRM builds mindshare, reinforces the value of the relationship with your brand, fosters trust, and provides your wholesalers with richer and timelier intelligence. IRM must also integrate seamlessly with existing sales force automation and CRM tools.