Insurance Marketing
Come Together

• Lori Chordas
• July 2020
• 

Cultivating relationships and effective communication are vital keys to marketing success and essential ways to amplify a company's brand, add value, attract top talent and drive revenue growth.

To achieve that success, marketers need to continually gather feedback from their leadership teams, peers, customers and others, and be authentic and “someone that people feel like they can relate to,” said Leah Ohodnicki, Argo Group's senior vice president and head of marketing and producer management in the Americas, during a May 15 webinar sponsored by AM Best and the Insurance Marketing and Communications Association.

Following is an edited transcript of the interview.

How are customer expectations changing the way we look at insurance, and how is marketing to consumers evolving to meet those expectations?

We need to be able to respond quickly, and that timeline continues to get shorter and shorter. In terms of how we approach that from a business standpoint, there's a great deal of focus around digital and handling transactional risk and how we can enable folks to write that business faster with less touch involved.

What that equates to in marketing is more real-time communication. Email is still the preferred method of communication, but I definitely see a shift toward social media and having the ability to cut through the clutter.

What do insurance marketers need to do to be taken more seriously and ensure their value is appreciated?

I've focused my career around what can I do to help salespeople achieve their goals because, ultimately, their goals are my goals. My team and I sit down with business leaders at the beginning of each year to understand their business objectives, how those values translate into marketing objectives and how we can measure that success together. We have an ongoing partnership with the business leaders to regularly review the progress made toward our objectives. I can measure success by clicks and opens, but if it translates into no dollars we probably haven't gotten anywhere.

You network within your company through your actions. We're very proactive about reaching out and creating relationships because at the end of the day consumers and others often look to marketing as a conduit to connect through the company.

What approaches are you taking around content marketing?

We have a very robust content marketing strategy. One of the main initiatives is a program called “Ascend with Argo,” which creates opportunities to connect with and develop early career producers in the industry by providing them with education, insights and support. More than 900 people have self-subscribed to the program, and they're actively receiving content we're developing and participating in events and webinars that we're hosting.