Last week InsTech London hosted another great event, this time in Shoreditch at Amnesty International in surroundings that were more hipster than InsurTech.

The colourful neighbourhood was seemingly chosen to reflect the topic of the evening: Marketing Innovation & InsurTech. Innovation often comes as a result of a need to change, and bringing the insurance faithful out of their comfort zone was an inspired choice by the organisers and one that hopefully sparked some new ideas.

A newfound appreciation for graffiti and craft beer aside, what did we gain from the event?

Innovation is rife

Firstly, it seems that marketing innovation is rife at a wide variety of InsurTech companies. Olivia Hendrick of Hiscox spoke of the interesting ways the company has used viral video to spread awareness of cyber risks (see their excellent ‘Hack’ videos here). The company reached over 20 million viewers with their large-scale campaign.

This is in direct contrast this with Inshur, a digital insurance platform for rideshare drivers, who have used small-scale community engagement to promote their service. As a business, their marketing approach relies more on word-of-mouth recommendations than large-scale ad campaigns. By identifying different driver communities in the US and the UK and working with them personally, the company has created a concrete sense of brand loyalty amongst their customers.

Challenges remain

However, despite the advancements different InsurTech companies are making in marketing, there remain several hurdles to get over.

Customer loyalty and retention rates are some of the biggest challenges insurers face because of the hugely competitive aggregator market. Why would a consumer who, after a year of buying mobile insurance finds their premium doubled, stick with the same company when they can visit a popular meerkat-based comparison site and pay a smaller premium elsewhere?

Getting customers to stick to their brand instead of flocking elsewhere is the focus of Gobsmack, whose Commercial Director Paul Glen also spoke at the event. The company provides a client-branded innovative cash reward system to their client’s customers to enhance retention rates and solve this ever-present problem.

Another common pitfall of insurance companies is the failure to properly market themselves on social media. One speaker at the event represents the straightforwardly-named Proper LinkedIn Marketing, a company who specialise in, well, proper LinkedIn marketing. Founder Chris William’s entertaining talk showed that even if you have a good product, getting the word out there to customers and other businesses on social media is a large task in and of itself.

How can Artificial learn from this?

As a B2B, Artificial don’t face some of the same potential pitfalls as certain companies. But the need for us to market and spread the word is just as important as it would be for any insurer. Tech companies often find themselves wanting to let the product speak for itself and ignore the need for innovative marketing, but in a crowded marketplace it can be hard to stand out even if your product does.

Artificial, as with other InsurTechs, should take the lessons learned from this great event and use them to think about how we can do things differently.

A way to go

In short, we learned that insurance companies are slowly looking outside of their box to think of new marketing strategies, including ways to overcome the industry’s biggest challenges, but that there is still a way to go.

Oh, and we learned the best time to post on LinkedIn is not Thursday morning but in fact when your community is most active. Thanks Chris.