Local sponsorships and branding are crucial to the success of any business – just look at Tim Hortons and their involvement in Send a Kid To Camp or TimBit soccer sponsorships. But are brokers spending their money wisely – and more importantly, using their social skills to their best advantage?
“It's been said before and I've read it before, but brokers really are the most natural social networkers on the planet,” says Ben Buckton, Director of Marketing & Communications at RSA Insurance. “Being social is all about conversation and collaboration – not one-way marketing & sales messages; it's not the right environment and quickly turns consumers to resent your brand. The focus should be on being honest, open and genuine – personal with personality.”
Sponsorships on the local level are crucial to maintaining that market presence in the local market.
“Sponsorships can offer great opportunity for brokers to access a defined customer group,” says Buckton. “These can take the form of sports, arts or community involvement or partnership. Each offers different opportunities. For example, investing in local grass-roots sports can be cost effective while providing brand awareness in a defined community with a great impact. Sponsorships generally are local (74% of sponsor dollars in Canada are at a provincial or lower level) - and these don’t have to be huge financial investments for your brokerage.”
The need to invest in popular community programs to market your brand can make or break your position in the local market, says Buckton. (continued)
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“Our marketing and communications is focused on supporting, advocating and educating our broker partners,” he says. “We do this by investing in a number of ways – a couple of examples include, investing in programs like Air Miles to give brokers a differentiator to attract customers and as a proven tool to help retain them. We also support our broker partners by sourcing and providing content to brokers through various web, email and social channels to be used with potential and existing customer communications and engagement.”
RSA strategically aligns marketing and communications to its business, broker and customer priorities, says Buckton – but when it comes to sponsorships, there must be specific alignments to brand and to business values.
“Sponsorship works best when it's clearly aligned to your brand/business values and your desired customer segment strategy,” says Buckton. “If not, then you run the risk of wasted time, money and investment. Or worse, attracting the wrong type of customers who destroy your margins.”
The investment in sponsorships can’t be a “fire and forget” weapon either. They demand a true ongoing commitment.
“When investing in sponsorship, you should always remember that whatever you spend on the actual partnership, you will need to probably spend the same again on properly activating that partnership to derive the greatest benefit from it,” says Buckton. “Whether that's advertising, events, hospitality or promotions, for example – make your investment work for you.”
Embedding the partnership to other marketing and communications activity is important as well – and to make sure it always aligns back to the customer.
And that comes around to putting people first, stresses Buckton, and putting themselves out there too. (continued.)
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“For a personal lines broker, I would say putting your people as the face of the company, making it feel local, community and support focused, is important,” he says. “Brokers have a great opportunity to really differentiate themselves from direct competitors, by being clear on their value proposition and the distinct advantage they bring in protecting people’s assets. Take the recent floods in Alberta and Toronto as an example; these events offer a great opportunity for brokers to demonstrate the power of not only being able to offer independent advice to ensure customers have the right type of protection in place, but also demonstrate the impact of having someone there as a support and advocate for them when things go wrong.”
Engaging the right people through social media is the Holy Grail for insurance brokers – not just a popularity contest, trying to get as many fans as possible.
“There are great opportunities for brokers to reach local people, but the focus however shouldn't just be on getting as many fans, followers or likes as possible – it needs to be on engaging with the right type of people over a period of time, demonstrating value-add, building a relationship and moving them along the sales cycle,” says Buckton.” Then when that prospect becomes a customer, you continue to utilize Social Media to retain them, sell them more and to find more customers, through advocacy programs targeting their like-minded connections.”
And don’t fall into the trap of having “insurance-only” conversations, cautions Buckton.
“It's not just about insurance conversations, there are related topics that have an ultimate insurance impact where brokers can instill themselves without startin the conversation about insurance – for example key life-stage moments such as buying a house, a car, marriage, having children,” he says. “All of these everyday events have insurance angles where a broker can begin or be involved in conversations.”
