Fintech developments like digital payment, budgeting, and investing apps have significantly transformed the financial sector. Similarly, insurtech — a blend of insurance and technology — has revolutionized how insurance companies conduct business, especially marketing.
However, while insurtech has unlocked various opportunities for insurtech marketers, it has its hurdles. In this blog post, we’ll explore the biggest challenges and opportunities in insurtech marketing to help you navigate and thrive in the dynamic insurance industry.
What Is Insurtech?
As the name implies, insurtech is a combination of the words insurance and technology. Also known as insurance technology or insurance tech, it refers to the use of technology innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, blockchain, machine learning (ML), and the Internet of Things (IoT) to streamline insurance processes.
Insurance companies use insurtech to enhance the customer experience, automate processes, and boost profits by growing their margins. Some examples of insurtech solutions include automated claims processing, insurance marketplaces, and telematic-based insurance policies.
What Challenges Is the Insurtech Market Facing?
Insurtech has the potential to transform the insurance industry dramatically. However, insurtech faces significant obstacles hindering its widespread integration and acceptance. Here are some challenges insurance tech faces:
Data Privacy and Security Concerns
As data breaches become increasingly common, more consumers are worried about their data privacy and security:
- Around 71% of Americans are concerned about how governments use their data.
- 67% of Americans don’t understand how companies use their data.
- Over 70% of consumers think they have no control over the data companies and governments collect.
This presents a significant challenge for insurtech companies, as customer information is vital to personalizing insurance products and services. To allay customer fears about how you use their personal information, you must emphasize the importance of transparency in your data handling practices. You must also implement proper security measures and demonstrate compliance with privacy regulations to gain and maintain customers’ trust.
Building Trust and Credibility
Research shows that more than half of customers don’t trust insurance companies. Several factors contribute to this, including obscure pricing, unclear policies, failure to settle claims, and so on. This makes it especially difficult for insurtech startups to promote their offerings.
To overcome this obstacle, you must provide your customers with clear and transparent information, free from industry jargon or complicated technical concepts. You can also build consumer trust and credibility in your business by displaying customer testimonials on your site and providing stellar customer service.
Overcoming Regulatory Hurdles
The insurance industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries globally, and insurance regulations vary widely across different regions and jurisdictions. Navigating these regulations requires an in-depth understanding of local and international law.
Ensure you work hand-in-hand with industry regulators and an attorney to ensure you don’t contravene any regulations, particularly those related to consumer protection, advertising, and financial services.
Educating Their Customers
Teaching customers about the benefits of insurance tech solutions can prove difficult, especially for insurers using traditional marketing strategies, such as print ads, cold calling, and direct mail. To overcome this challenge, consider using digital marketing channels like social media, email marketing, and insurance SEO (search engine optimization) to promote your offerings, particularly if you want to reach a younger audience.
However, even as you leverage digital marketing strategies, remember to communicate your offerings clearly and avoid using overly technical terms.
Competing Against Other Insurtech Startups and Traditional Insurers
Startups in the insurance sector face stiff competition from other insurtech startups as well as already established insurers. This intense competition compels startups to set themselves apart by adopting innovative marketing strategies.
To differentiate your offerings from competitors, consider investing in innovative marketing approaches like SEO and content marketing to demonstrate your insurance industry expertise or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to attract customers interested in your products or services.
Keeping Up With Rapidly Advancing Technology
The insurtech industry is fast-paced, and it can be challenging to keep up with technology that’s always changing. To stay up to date on current industry trends and developments, attend insurtech conferences, read reputable industry publications, and network with industry experts on professional platforms like LinkedIn.
Where Are the Marketing Opportunities for Insurtech Companies?
Insurtech companies face various challenges in their efforts to promote insurtech solutions. However, these challenges aren’t insurmountable, and there are many opportunities in insurtech marketing.
Rework and Innovate Current Insurtech Trends
As an insurtech company, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. By thoroughly analyzing the effectiveness of current trends, such as peer-to-peer insurance apps or on-demand insurance services, you can identify potential gaps or areas for improvement.
For instance, you could integrate artificial intelligence into an existing service to better predict customer needs, demands, and expectations to differentiate your offerings from competitors.
Use Data-Driven Marketing
The insurance industry is highly data-driven due to its reliance on actuarial science to forecast claims and determine premiums.
You can leverage data to make data-driven marketing decisions to target consumers better, improve marketing campaigns, and optimize pricing. For instance, using Google Analytics to track visitors’ actions on the website. What marketing channels are driving visitors? Conversions?
Utilize Customized SEO Strategies
Many insurtech companies are competing for attention online. If you want to stand out, adopting customized SEO strategies can significantly enhance your company’s visibility. These strategies include optimizing website content, keywords, meta tags, and meta descriptions for insurance-related queries.
Additionally, you can compete favorably with local insurtech companies and make it easier for local customers to find your offerings by prioritizing local SEO. By partnering with insurance SEO experts to implement tailored SEO strategies, you can boost organic traffic to your website, enhance brand awareness, and eventually convert more leads into customers.
Personalize Customer Experiences
About seven out of ten customers expect companies to deliver personalized experiences, and almost eight out of ten consumers feel frustrated when this expectation isn’t fulfilled.
You can leverage data analytics and AI to provide customized insurtech solutions that meet individual customers’ unique needs and preferences, such as offering personalized insurance policy recommendations. You can also use data to personalize your marketing campaigns and enhance their effectiveness. This can result in a substantial increase in revenue, as companies that personalize their offerings generate 40% more revenue than those that don’t.
Have Intuitive UX Throughout Your Website
Most customers care about the user experience (UX) on company websites. More than 80% of customers are unlikely to return to a site with poor UX. This applies to both web and mobile versions of the site and means you can’t afford to ignore the UX design on your website.
You can enhance a user’s experience throughout your website by doing the following:
- Optimizing page speed to improve load times
- Making your website responsive across all devices
- Planning content carefully and creating a clear visual hierarchy to ease navigation
- Using high-contrast colors and readable typefaces to make your site accessible
- Using white space to improve text readability
- Having clear calls-to-action (CTAs) that guide customers to the next step.
While this list isn’t exhaustive of all the measures you can take to improve the UX on your website, it’s a good place to start. Also, consider undertaking user research and usability tests to determine what customers desire and prefer, as doing so can help you make informed decisions on how to improve how customers use your website.
Making your website user-friendly can not only boost customer satisfaction but also increase customer retention, improve conversions, generate leads, and, ultimately, drive sales.
Streamline Daily Processes and Operations
Insurtech companies can significantly improve response times and service quality by leveraging automation and integrating digital solutions to accelerate claims processing and underwriting.
For instance, instead of manually evaluating each compensation claim, you can use insurance tech to gather data, authenticate claims, eliminate fraud using AI, and efficiently disburse payments to policyholders on a large scale. This operational efficiency can allow you to dedicate more resources towards enhancing customer care and providing tailored services, making your company attractive to potential customers.
Start Link Building
Besides using customized SEO strategies, link building or getting backlinks is another excellent way insurtech companies can enhance their online presence and search engine results page (SERP) ranking. Simply put, link building involves getting other websites to link back to your site.
By creating high-quality, relevant content that many other websites link to, you can signal that your content is valuable to search engines. Or, you can create content that is easily shared on social media and creates links from your social accounts back to your website.
As a result, link building can drive traffic and establish your company as an authority in the insurtech sector.
Here are some ways to get high-quality backlinks:
- Create linkable content such as comprehensive guides, data-driven case studies, and compelling infographics.
- Contact bloggers and publishers in the insurtech space and offer to write guest posts.
- Sign up for Help a Reporter (HARO) to connect with journalists looking for sources for their pieces.
- Partner with a strategic link building company
While this list of strategies to get backlinks isn’t exhaustive, implementing them can drastically improve your website’s rankings and authority.
Explore a Multitude of Marketing Channels
Multichannel marketing offers various benefits compared to single-channel marketing. By diversifying your marketing efforts to include traditional and digital marketing strategies, you can reach more potential customers, convert leads faster, and increase engagement. Additionally, you can create a consistent image across various channels, enhancing your brand awareness and credibility.
For example, if your target audience spans Gen X to Gen Z, using social media ads can allow you to reach a wider audience and improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
How Can Insurtech Startups Get Ahead of Their Marketing?
Insurtech startups face various obstacles in their marketing efforts. However, these obstacles aren’t impossible to overcome. By reworking and innovating current insurance trends and leveraging data, insurtech startups can optimize their marketing campaigns.
Using customized SEO strategies and personalizing customer experiences, insurtech companies can create marketing campaigns that resonate with customers. Furthermore, by prioritizing good UX and link building, insurtech companies can drive more organic site traffic and boost conversion rates.
Finally, by using multiple marketing channels rather than one, insurtech startups can reach more customers and connect with them on their preferred channels.
That said, here are some helpful tips that can help your startup stay ahead of the curve in the competitive insurtech sector:
- Leverage data analytics: Use data analytics to obtain insights into consumer behavior and preferences to improve the efficacy of your marketing campaigns.
- Invest in technology: Integrate the latest technologies, such as AI, blockchain, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), to streamline operations, improve customer service, and offer new products and services.
- Embrace personalization: Offer personalized insurtech solutions tailored to customers’ needs and preferences to enhance customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty.
- Focus on customer experience: Prioritize the customer experience by simplifying processes and responding promptly to customer queries and complaints.
These are just a few opportunities your insurtech company can utilize to get ahead of the competition. By identifying your specific challenges early on, you can figure out what areas you need to focus on to improve your marketing efforts.
If you have any questions or need further help, reach out to us here at Sure Oak! We help companies like yours meet their goals while maintaining sustainable growth.
