With 21% of businesses having either reduced, or considered reducing, their insurance cover in 2023, insurance firms must ensure their marketing strategies are effective in securing purchasing decisions amidst a decline in demand.

So, what challenges do insurance firms face when it comes to effective marketing, and why do so many firms in the sector struggle to create successful, engaging campaigns?

Marketing challenges in insurance

As with many businesses, acquisition costs are a constant battle. For insurance companies in particular, the ability for consumers to price compare and shop around for insurance options means marketing activities must work harder to ensure quality leads.

In the minds of many consumers, insurance has a negative reputation. Communications, therefore, must be able to effectively build trust and positive brand reputation, while capturing, engaging and educating the target audience.

When compared to physical products, insurance is more conceptual, making the task of bringing an audience on side without those physical touchpoints that much more challenging. Messaging, then, is paramount in creating a marketing concept with true staying power in the minds of your potential customers.

For all these reasons it’s more crucial than ever to run more effective marketing for your firm.

Why insurance marketing campaigns may underperform

With insurance campaigns often living or dying by the quality of their messaging, a lack of outside perspective on marketing activities is a perhaps less obvious reason so many insurance marketing strategies fail to gain traction.

While insurers are certainly experts on their products and services, they often lack genuine insight in how to best position those products to customers and various target demographics. Even for in-house marketing teams, it can be difficult to know if messaging and campaigns are really hitting the right notes with consumers without that outside perspective. Much of marketing is, after all, an iterative endeavour, and a lack of insightful feedback can make it that much harder to know whether campaigns are resonating in the way they were intended, if messaging is clear, and if marketing communications about insurance services and products are truly highlighting the benefits and solving the pain points of your potential customer base.

The role of third party “expert” feedback

The issue with seeking feedback from inside the company is down to a lack of detachment. It’s unlikely that those within a firm, or those close to it, will be able to produce truly unbiased assessments of marketing activities, which in turn limits their ability to understand how effective this messaging is from an outside perspective.

For feedback to be useful, it needs to come from a place of unbiased detachment, whilst also being sufficiently well-informed enough to generate practical and valuable insights. This is where peer feedback comes into play.

While it is of course still valuable to solicit opinions from others within the insurance sector, gaining additional perspectives from other industries can prove equally useful, and open up new ideas and avenues for approaches that may be industry standard in other areas. Those already in business are ideally placed to do just this. They already have an immediate understanding of the pressures and demands of running a business and creating effective strategies to support that business, while possessing enough distance from your own firm to offer honest opinion uncoloured by personal relationships or existing preconceptions.

This kind of regular feedback and insight from peers is what the vast majority of marketing strategies lack, and done correctly, can form a foundation for successful iteration of marketing campaigns and communications.

One might say this extra step is a form of “insurance” against the risk of marketing failure.

Final thoughts

The insurance sector undoubtedly faces unique challenges when it comes to effective marketing. Messaging and creativity both play a key role in targeting audience segments, building trust and fostering increased engagement, while marketing strategies overall must work harder than ever to keep acquisition costs low and continue generating quality leads.

Given these obstacles, insurance firms that fail take the extra step of soliciting honest, qualified feedback may find they are simply throwing good money away and missing out on an opportunity to optimise their marketing campaigns.